


Penance Series

by Acciofirewhiskey



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Ward Guardian Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-09
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-18 06:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 47,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/558089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acciofirewhiskey/pseuds/Acciofirewhiskey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Instead of locking Belle in the asylum, Regina and the curse make Belle an orphan. Gold takes her in and raises her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1: Some Penance Is Due

**Author's Note:**

> Part 1 | the garden of life, nurtur’d ’mid weeds (8-13)

At least the world had the decency to rain, he thinks.

Hidden in the trees skirting the edge of Storybrooke’s one cemetery, Rumpelstiltskin remembers how twilight colored itself gold and yellow to match her dress the night he spirited her away, how the winter ice covering the peaks of the mountains and edges of the window panes matched itself to the blue of her eyes, and how the greens came alive when first she stepped out in that cloak he’d conjured to keep her warm.

He should not be surprised that now the world weeps for her. Not a new occurrence, of course, creation bending to accommodate Belle—in this world, as well as the last, it would seem. That’s why he himself is here after all.

Unseen, wrapped in his down-lined, wool three-piece and matched coat, he weathers the winter drizzle, just a degree or two above freezing to bear witness to the funeral for which he must largely take blame.

The grand total present amounts to five: Belle, the minister, the mayor, and the two women of the cloth, who keep watch over the mourning daughter—six, including himself, wicked Mr. Gold (which he doesn’t. He _never_ counts himself).

(The party rounds off to a perfect seven, if one counts the dead man, cold in the ground).

Moe French died five days prior, the late ice storm surprising the town. His delivery van lost traction on a patch of black ice. The vehicle went off the road, down a ravine and, flipped, throwing the driver. Without a seat belt, the man flew from the window, neck snapping upon hitting the ground. He died instantly.

The funeral takes place as soon as the second occupant is able to leave the hospital. Belle French survived the crash, receiving only mild bumps and scrapes, the visible wounds nothing a few stitches could not repair (the invisible ones are another matter entirely).

Gold watches as the reverend motions and the casket begins to lower into the ground. Belle sobs and the woman to her left pulls her into a close embrace. Mother Superior extends a hand to her arm, but Belle pulls away from the touch.

As she cries, it begins to rain in harder, the light drizzle turning into something of a downpour. The world cries for her because she’s in pain. The world cries for her because it loves her. He understands all too well.

The party disperses, the reverend giving a solemn nod to those in attendance and a pitying look to Belle. The mayor leaves next, giving words of comfort Gold knows to be false as those she offered to her own step-child upon the death of a father once so very long ago. Finally, Belle stands alone, with the women of the cloth. The secondary nun follows Mother Superior, scurrying to keep up with the tiny woman’s pace, her arm about Belle’s shoulder. As they retreat in the chilly rain, Belle looks back.

She had not been one to look back in the old world.

After the cars are gone (slowly, for the roads are known to be dangerous), He leaves his hiding spot. He creeps down the hill, chilled, to pay last respects to the dead royal. The headstone is simple, marking the resting place of both Mr. and Mrs. French, lord and lady, husband and wife. False dates and names mark the stone, and etched in a finer, twisted script the first three stanzas of Byron’s Love’s Last Adieu are inscribed along the top, bookmarked on each side with a rose, thorns visible. He knows the poem well-enough, knows well all the gothic horror works (and more romanticism than he would ever publicly claim). He finds the sentiment a bit out the dead florist’s depth, the choice must have been that of his wife’s—or so the curse says.

“I’ll keep my word,” he apologizes, quietly. “I’ll take care of her.”

His vow is most certainly not in vain, and lasting through both this and age last: it’s the only form of penance he can give to the dead and desperate soul. He hopes it comfort enough to allow the man to make that last journey, that the father will find rest deserved.

Rumpelstiltskin turns his back on the cemetery, the dead a lost cause, and after all, he has so much work to done on behalf of the living.

* * *

Summer last, when Moe French had walked into his shop, Rumpelstiltskin recognizes him immediately.

“Mr. Gold?” he asks, taking tentative steps into the shop, fear of the infamous pawnbroker evident in his expression.

Gold tries to hide the sharp twinge of pain he feels at the sight. He clears his throat saying, “Indeed, and you’re Maurice French, I think.”

As the man approaches, he notes the man has her eyes, and when he smiles, her smile too, “You can just call me Moe.” The burly man reaches a hand across the counter, which Gold takes after only a second’s hesitation at putting on his usual mask of cold indifference.

“Pleasure,” he says, dropping the man’s meaty hand, “and what can I do for you today, Moe? You’re in need of a loan, I take it.”

French’s face goes sheepish—clearly he’s here as a last resort, this world, as the last, the man only comes to him when in desperate need. “How’d you know?”

“Oh, I find not many come to me without some kind of deal in mind.”

Surprisingly, Moe French chuckles, “Well, I figure that’s about right, Mr. Gold.” After a moment, the dealmaker joins him laughing under his breath, lightly. “I’m in the flower business, own a shop, but lately business hasn’t been too good.”

Gold doubts the problems have come of late, but he makes no mention of that assumption. “The shop off of Main Street?”

“Yeah, that’s mine, but I’ve figured out the problem.” He pulls out a few crumpled sheets from his back pocket, and passes them to Gold, “people don’t have the time to go shopping for flowers, so I think if I got myself a delivery van, I’d, oh, I don’t, double sales, triple maybe.”

The lawyer pulls his reading glasses from his pocket and reviews the messy pages. The business plan isn’t bad, but neither is it good.

“A client of mine said you’d help me and my girl.” Gold observes the ring on the man’s left hand. French refers to his wife of course, his girl. He’s glad the man has sought him out alone, for he’d not have had the strength to see the woman he knows surely must bear a striking resemblance to her daughter, the lost princess. “If we’d move out of our place into something smaller, I could use the difference to buy the van myself. House’s much too big for being just the of us now, but my girl’d be devastated if we left it. Just can’t do that to her.”

Gold nods. “In that case, I can be of some assistance.” He outlines his initial idea for a loan with a large interest rate, though not as high as he usually charges, using the house as collateral. Moe French agrees without argument, happily. “I’ll just need to take a photocopy of your driver’s license, for my records, you see, and I’ll draft up the contract for you to sign tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” French says, but at the moment his pager begins to ring on his hip. He looks down and swears lightly under his breath. “Sorry, I’m running a bit behind schedule. You wouldn’t have a phone I could use.”

Gold gestures to the back room, and the man thanks him, before pulling his wallet out of his jack and setting it on the countertop. “License is in one of the front pockets.”

The lawyer frowns at the thoughtless and over-trusting action. The man had never been terribly bright, but the curse had accentuated his more careless attributes. He flips open the wallet and his hands freeze.

Inside is a photograph. A photograph of Belle.

 _She died_.

His hands shake as he digs through the wallet looking for further evidence of what this can mean. The curse included the tragic tale into its weaving. Surely that must be it. In this world, the florist and his wife lost a child. Gold finds a handful more photos. He stares down at the last he finds. The girl sits reading in a lawn chair, head in her hands. Her eyes look up into the his, as if she’s only been just recently disturbed from her book. He slips the photo into his jacket behind his pocket square, and taking Moe French’s state issued identification goes to the backroom to take his copy.

“I know—I know you don’t like to stay late, honey. I’ll be there soon.” Moe French sighs into the telephone attached to the far wall of the workroom. “Please be patient. This’ll be the last time, I swear it.”

As the machine whirs, Gold turns to look at the man sidelong. The man smiles at the person on the other end. “Alright, on my way—love you too, Belles.”

Gold falters, grasping the photocopy machine to stay upright.

Moe French hangs up laughing, “You know, Gold, no matter how old I get, I’ll never understand women.”

“Your wife?” he asks, voice hardly more than a strained whisper.

“Daughter. My wife passed a few years back,” French shakes his head, “I can never keep it straight when school lets ‘em out. She just hates that, but what can you do?” he shrugs.

Gold clears his throat, head swimming. He turns back to the machine, fiddles with the off switch and takes his time collecting the license and duplicate. “And how old is your daughter—“

“Isabelle. She’s eight, and all her mother, thank God.” Gold manages to hand back the I.D. without obvious abnormality. The father takes it smiling, “Well, I got to be getting on, but I’ll be back tomorrow, same time?”

The shopkeeper nods, stunned, and follows the florist out into the main room. French gathers up the wallet, not even bothering to check and ensure nothing missing. “Thanks again, Mr. Gold. Really appreciate it,” he says shaking the dazed man’s hand, before hurrying out of the shop. As the bell on the door echoes at the man’s exit, Rumpelstiltskin’s world takes a few moments to start spinning again.

She’s alive.

He’s in his car in minutes, following the florist to the local school. From a safe distance, he watches French pick up a displeased little girl, a little girl who can only be Belle (just as he’d know Bae, he knows Belle, at any age, in any world).

He watches the father apologize to his daughter, nudging and joking with her, until finally the girl gives in and smiles, forgiving him for his tardiness. Long after the father and daughter drive off in their beaten up truck, Gold sits in his car, letting the weight of the discovery sink in.

He needs not be told that this is Regina’s doing. What he doesn’t know (doesn’t need to know) is the how. Did the queen watch, with amusement, as his Belle was tortured for her association with the Dark One? Watch as she threw herself off the tower in despair, always one to decide her own fate.

Did the queen watch, silent and sneering, only to pick up the scattered pieces, staunch the blood flow, set the bones, reanimate the corpse? Only to lock her away in some basement to heal and wait, unable to resist saving this pawn, unable to resist bringing her over?

(Or was it all a lie, and she took his Belle from the beginning to some dark and lonely place without warmth and books, to wait out further prison sentence? He daren’t even wish it, for the price of comfort lost if he learns himself incorrect).

He doesn’t know whether to thank her or throttle her.

Of course, Regina would make Belle out of reach, a child, an innocent. A life of comfort he’d bartered for in this new land without magic, but not love. Of course, not love.

No matter. She’s alive. She’s real. That’s all that matter, and this time, he’d protect her. He’d keep her safe. Regina would never hurt his Belle again.

* * *

The next day, Moe French returns. He arrives alone, to Gold’s great relief (and disappointment). After the papers are signed, the money order turned over to French and a copy of the deed to house to Gold, the dealmaker asks nonchalantly, simply to be absolutely sure. “Yesterday, you’d mentioned something about a referral?”

“Oh yeah, the mayor. She said you’d be able to help.”

So Regina was behind this wickedness. “Ah, Mayor Mills, always a servant of the people.” French gives him a look that declares loudly the man’s ignorance, but Gold, looking at his watch says, “I should let you be on your way, wouldn’t want to disappoint your girl two days in a row.”

Moe’s eyes go wide, “Shit, you’re right.” Gold winces at the brusque man’s manners. He hopes he refrains from excessive cursing in his home. “Almost forgot.” He practically runs out of the shop, grasping the folder of paperwork haphazardly.

It’s not the last time Mr. Gold sees Moe French, but the last time they speak. Six months later, the man dies in the crash, and Belle becomes an orphan (and Rumpelstiltskin begins to make good on his promise of forever).

* * *

The freezing rain gives way to sleet and snow and ice. More ice again to torment her. And to torment and punish him too, he suppose.

The ice freezes on the nose of the statue of the holy mother outside the rented convent of the Sisters of Saint Mary of Storybrooke. It makes a mockery of her pious gaze. He’s not one for sacrilege except when it’s ironic, though if this time, if the natural defacement of the statue tweaks the nose of Reul Ghorm so much the better.

The woman’s found easily enough, lurking around the confessional boxes and prayer candles in the sanctuary. When he enters, she’s yelling and raising hell, of course. She shouts orders at a poor, young custodian who works with stain along the edges of the box, “You said you could get this scratch out, she’s a child—she couldn’t have scratched it that deep.” Turing to an alter boy, she yells, “What are you still doing here? I thought I told you to finish trimming those wicks.” As the boy scurries over to the candles, she says more to herself than anyone, putting a hand to her head, “I swear I have to do everything around here.”

When the clanking of his cane on the expensive wood floor announces his presence to the Mother Superior stiffens visibly, her back to him. She does not turn  As he approaches, instead, she waits for him to make the first move. “Mother Superior, good day.”

“Mr. Gold, I wasn’t expecting you until the end of the month next week. As per our agreement.”

He frowns at the woman’s sugary smile. “You’ve no need to remind me of a contract I wrote myself, dearie.”

“Then what business brings you here? Forgive my frankness, but I’ve never known you to worry much over the fate of your eternal soul.”

He snickers, “Yes, yes, you know me oh so well. I’m not here for absolution either—at least, not of the kind in which you deal.”

The face that could be pretty, were it not made of stone, tightens. “You’re here about the child.”

He smiles, all wickedness at the woman’s quick mind (and it’s times like these that he wonders if she  _knows_ ). “I am.”

“Well, Mr. Gold, I can assure you, she’s very well-looked after.” She clasps her hands in mock piety. “Our sisters are certainly not in need of your kind of assistance.”

“My kind?” he asks, mockingly, “Why, whatever do you mean ‘my kind’.”

“Don’t think me ignorant to your practice of treating the orphans and fatherless as nothing more than another kind of merchandise to be bartered. You’ll not find us as eager to exchange a lost lamb for monetary gains.”

He wonders just how long the statement would stand in the face of larger gains or months of free rent. He doubts long. (Faeries, not unlike Goblins, can hardly resist all things that shine and shimmer, and even gold coin can stay afloat in a treasury on a cloud with enough magic beneath to hold it up).

“Dear Mother Superior, I’ve no intention of selling the child. I’m here to collect her.” He adds for force, “She’s coming with me.”

That shocks her. Her eyes go wide and a small gasp escapes her dainty mouth before the perfect mask of serenity and composure returns. “That is… very unorthodox,” she says after a lengthy pause.

“Be that as it may, I’m not leaving here without the girl.”

“I don’t think so. The mayor charged me and the Sisters with her care.”

“I’ve already spoken with our dear lady mayor.” He pulls a signed letter from Regina, as well as the court order, also commissioned by Regina—and all it took was for the him to ask nicely, the evil queen always an agreeable one, once she saw reason.

The Mother Superior narrows her eyes at him, taking the legal documents warily. “Hm,” she says finally. Frowning at Mr. Gold, she folds them back up and hands them to him, “It would seem you’re serious about this.” She yells at the alter boy to run and fetch Isabelle French, leaving the two of them alone in the sanctuary, “I only wonder,” she begins, her face turning a lying shade of concerned, “if this truly is in the poor child’s best interest. You’re well known to be a cold, calculating man. A miser, who only loves money. Is that really the proper home for a child in need of warmth and nurturing?” She shrugs, and toys with the rosary at her neck, before adding, “Not to mention, I can hardly fathom your reasons for even wanting a child.”

He wants to tell her to shove her reasons, that he loves Belle and will give her more warmth than the world could even begin to understand—that he loves her more than power, more than life itself. That he’d have traveled through time and space for her, had he known she yet lived.

Instead he says nothing, for it’s a known fact that fairies can’t love. The Mother Superior would never understand.

Instead he speaks to Reul Ghorm in a language she will understand, justice and debts (he wasn’t the only one in the Enchanted Forest to grant wishes with conditions, to right the occasional wrong when it suited him, in other words, when he’d something to gain from the transaction. They were no different, just used different mediums in which to exact their work).

“Some penance is due, I think.” The woman’s brow furrows, and he goes on to explain, “I loaned her father the amount needed to purchase the vehicle that became his untimely end.” He places both hands atop his cane and says evenly words that encompass and yet are so minimal when compared to his true, meaningless intentions, “The debt is mine, and so must be the remedy.”

The Mother Superior stares, dumbfounded and says, “It would seem you do have a heart, after all.”

Gold frowns at the woman who knows nothing of his heart, what’s in it, what makes him human, and considers telling her so, but a voice causes both parties to turn. A spritely nun, Sister Astrid ushers in young Belle.

She carries with her a suitcase, and Gold wonders at her speed, wonders at its minimal size, (wonders if she’d even bothered to unpack at all). “Mother Superior, you asked to see us?” The two come forward, the frowning little girl grips the other woman’s hand tightly. He realizes it’s the nun that held and comforted her at the funeral. Once close enough, he looks at Belle. She’s a perfect miniature of herself, and looks like porcelain doll, a sad and perfect porcelain doll.

“Yes, I did,” Mother Superior tells the pair. “Isabelle, Mr. Gold has offered to give you a home,” she says, and the words are menacing, perhaps a last attempt to frighten and taint the girl’s trust of him. His hands clutch at the cane to keep it on the floor and not at the woman’s neck.

Belle looks from Mother Superior to him, and their eyes meet. She immediately returns to staring at the floor, scuffing her shoes, loudly. Though he knows her to be eight years old, she looks impossibly small and young in that moment.

“You don’t have to go with him,” Astrid says, bending over to talk to the girl at her level. 

Gold realizes he had not thought to ask Belle’s opinion on the matter. She may very well not want to go with him, the man who sold her father the van that killed him—not intentionally, but his fault, all the same.

He should have known better. Curses are unforgivable entities. Curses kill quickly enough without help from him. It’s as much his fault as if he’d been driving or been the ice storm.

“Sister Astrid!” Mother Superior reprimands, “that’s not your place—“

Gold cuts off the insufferable woman, “The good Sister’s right. Say the word, and you’re free to stay.” He had not thought to the wishes of the child, but he’ll not force her. It’s Belle’s choice.

It’s always been Belle’s choice.

She looks up, far up for she’s a tiny thing, at eight years old. He watches her expression, taking the measure of him, for the second time. She nods, slowly. Quiet, but firm, she says, “I will go with you.”

He too nods, somber, “Then the deal’s struck.” He turns to Mother Superior. “You’ll be so kind as to collect the rest of her things?” he orders, without room for questioning.

“As you see them,” she says, gesturing to the miniscule, beat-up leather suitcase in the girl’s hands.

“That’s all she has?”

“We lead a simple life here in the convent, Mr. Gold. We’d not have raised Isabelle to place an emphasis on worldly goods,” she says, eyeing his mahogany cane and gold ring.

He thinks to berate her for the meager belongings she’d allowed the child, but imagines it would do nothing to set the wary child at ease to see him yell at the Mother Superior. So he bites his tongue and consoles himself that he’ll get her properly stocked soon enough. “I see.”

“I’ll walk you both out,” Sister Astrid says, giving Belle’s hand a reassuring squeeze.

As they turn to leave, Mother Superior reaches down to touch Belle’s cheek, saying, “Goodbye, dear—“

Belle jerks away, and the woman takes back her hand. Gold smirks. “Let’s be off, then,” he says, and gestures to the exit.

Gold leads the way, Astrid and Belle a little behind. As she walks beside the other nun, he hears an intermittent banging sound, and realizes that the child is knocking her luggage against the edge of every single pew. The passive resistance echoes loudly through the sanctuary. He can positively feel the Blue Fairy fuming behind the little party. Chuckling, he reaches down and plucks the suitcase out of her hands. “Why don’t I take that, dearie.”

At the gate, he loads her tiny bag into the trunk of his Cadillac, while she gives her goodbyes, remembering how in the last world he’d nary given her the chance. He takes his time with a task that needs only a few seconds, he shuts the trunk only after he see the two conclude their hugs. He limps back up, and opens the door for her.

“Now remember you can visit, any time,” Sister Astrid says, patting the girl’s brown curls. Belle nods and climbs into the car, fastening her seat belt without thinking twice.

Gold tips his head to the nun, and thinks that if only they were all like her—insipid and silly and not much for questioning the status quo, but overall good at heart—he might not hate their kind quite so terribly. Then he remembers Bae, and hates her all the more on principle and because she’d almost had him tricked.

They drive in complete silence, until Gold clears his throat, “She’s right you know, you can visit the convent, if that is your wish—though why you’d desire to would be beyond me my reasoning.” They stop at the stop sign before turning onto the main, heavily salted freeway that will lead them back to Storybrooke proper. Mumbling under his breath, he adds, “And the Mayor’d thought it a right proper foster home,” he scoffs, “Foster hell is more like—“

Belle chokes out a little laugh.

Gold’s foot falters on the gas pedal, shocked at the sound. At his surprise, she stifles the sound. He recovers quickly, masking his expression. “So you did not like it there, I take it?”

“No,” she whispers.

“Then I am glad to be taking you away,” he says quietly. He stares at the road, but through the edge of his sight, he knows Belle to be looking at him. She says nothing, and neither speak again for the rest of the drive.

* * *

Once back at the pink house. Gold leads her inside, and just as before, she’s wide eyed, her stare bouncing around, taking in his strange collection.

The parallel is too much for him, and so he says, to give himself space to breath and something to think on other than her eyes and how much he loves her. He decides, “Tea, I think.”

Gold leaves her in the parlor, and goes to the kitchen to set the kettle to boil. Once the water’s heating, he clutches the countertop, attempting to catch his breath, catch his sanity. He knows not how long he’s stood there gripping the edge of the sink like a madman, but when he turns, determined to get to work setting up a tea service for them, the kettle’s begun to steam. He takes a step toward the cupboard, and almost trips over Belle.

Regaining his balance he scurries a few steps back. She does likewise, but her eyes don’t move from where they rest, staring at the steam from the kettle like she’s never seen it before.

She feels him staring, and blinks up at him. Self-conscious, in a way no child of eight has the right to be, she stares at the ground. Gold would have to do something about that new fear in her. “You can look, if you like. It’s alright, to be curious.” He tells her. “You do understand what’s happening, yes?” he asks, gesturing to the silver kettle. She doesn’t answer, but slowly looks back up to the stovetop. “Water, when heated, the molecules—the little bits, that is—move around very fast, and it turns into a chemical—a gas. That’s the steam you see.”

“When it gets to boiling point,” Belle says. “Two hundred and twelve degrees.”

“Yes, exactly, That’s the measurement, the way we say how large or small something is: Fahrenheit, and do you know the other measurement for hot and cold?”

She shakes her head, as the kettle begins to whistle at them. “Celsius.” He takes it off the heat. “It’s like Fahrenheit, but a different set of numbers to measure things, what they use where I’m from,” he tells her, for it’s true enough. Pulling a tea pot from one of the cabinets, he continues, “One hundred degrees, for the Celsius boiling point.”

He putters about the kitchen, fetching cups and spoons and tea packets, as well as cream and sugar, knowing how she takes her tea. “Do you know freezing point?” he asks, as he closes the refrigerator door.

Belle goes sad at the word “freezing.” She looks to the back door, where the rain toys with the idea of turning to ice. “Thirty-two,” she says.

“Quite right,” he could kick himself for his blunder, for reminding her. He tries to distract her, “And if Celsius boiling is one hundred, that system uses sets, groups that is, of ten, what might be the freezing point? Can you guess?”

Belle thinks for a moment. “Ten?” she asks.

“Close, a bit lower.”

“Zero,” she answers with more assurance.

He nods to her, “Yes, exactly.”

* * *

They sit down in the living room, forsaking the parlor, and he stokes up a fire, while she swings her legs on the couch, not long enough to reach the floor.

“Hey—This one’s chipped. What are you doing using a chipped cup for?”

His hand freezes on the fire stoker, shocked again, and at a loss for words. Of course, how could he have been so stupid, his Belle ever a smart little thing would notice the marred and perfect porcelain cup he treasures so.

Clearing his throat he falls back into instruction, “Say, ‘why are you using a chipped cup,’ or ‘what are you doing using a chipped cup.’ It’s not proper ending your sentence with ‘for.’ What are they teaching in that school of yours, I wonder?” It’s true, he’d be having to make a call to get a copy of the syllabus later this week.

A little wrinkle mars her forehead (so little as almost to be invisible, but he knows it to be there, so he spots it without even having to really look), “Why?”

“Because ‘for’ is a preposition and we wouldn’t want you sounding like an uneducated, little ne’er-do-well now, would we”? After a moment, Belle shakes her head. “I thought not.”

He sits down and holding out his hand, she returns the cup, and he pours two cups of tea. Before he can stop her, she grabs it up again.

Belle intends to use it. She takes a loud gurgling sip—they’d be needing to work on that, as well—and makes a face at the bitter brew. She sets it back down, clearly unimpressed.

Gold plucks it up. “Now, no need to be hasty, you didn’t let me add cream and sugar. That,” he says conspiratorially, “makes all the difference, I think you’ll find.”

He adds and stirs, using more hand gestures than he usually employs. Unsure, she takes the cup, sipping again. “Hm,” she says, thoughtful.

“What?” Gold asks, intrigued at her expression.

“I remember this.”

“You _—what_ —“

“I used to have tea with my mama.” Ah, right, her memories of her second youth, here in Storybrooke. “But not since she, you know, died.”

“Of course.”

“But this tastes better, I think.”

He smiles and refrains from telling her she likes it better because it’s been prepared just the way he knows her to like it best.

* * *

After tea, he leads her to the guest room he’s prepared for her, and leaves her to prepare their dinner.

An hour later he peeks in on her to tell her dinner is ready, only to find her asleep atop the covers. Hard asleep, as any child. A book he doesn’t recognize lies open on her chest. She must have brought it with her in the tiny suitcase.

He takes the book, places a tissue from the night table to hold her place—who was he to know if she’d been reading intently—and sets it on the table. After, as gently as he can manage, he pulls the blankets out from under her and tucks her in, wiping her messy hair from her brow, and before thinking the better of it, kisses her forehead.

No curses break, but neither does she wake. All in all, not a loss. 

He takes the chipped cup downstairs, from where she’d left it empty on the night stand (he’d planned to forbid food and drink from the upstairs rooms, but now doubts he’ll have the heart for such a rule), forgoing supper himself, he instead finishes the last of their tea. It’s too strong, even for his liking, having steeped for hours. After, he goes to bed early, falling into a deep sleep, despite the caffeine.

Tomorrow there would be time for going over rules and plans and the way things were to be, she still on bereavement leave from her lessons, and he not over keen to open the shop, his knee already aching form the poor weather conditions. There’d be time to get her things, to get her settled. There’d be time for everything.

They’d this one night, at least, to rest.


	2. Part 1: A Year in the Life or the 5 Stages of Grief

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Five Stages of Grief, otherwise known as A Year in the Life of the Town Odd Couple in the Pink House.

The two men watch the little girl play idly in the lobby.

“The next few months are going to be very difficult for her,” Archie Hopper says, pulling a pamphlet out of his jacket pocket and passing it to Mr. Gold. The older man turns the folded paper over in his hands. It’s a pamphlet on the five stages of grief. “It’s a lot of change in a very short amount of time,” the doctor explains quietly, but gesturing with his hands, showing Gold that the man cares deeply about his work and his patients. “She’s likely to be unpredictable; be patient with her. You’ll need to be prepared.”

He scans the paper, but sighs, looking back to Belle, bow in her hair, cheeks plump from residual baby fat. How he was going to shepherd this little thing, he had no idea. “What must I do?” he asks, helplessly.

“At first? Just be there, for her, in any way you can.” Archie walks over to the bookshelf and pulls out a slim volume. “Communication will be key, so be prepared to talk with her—but don’t guide the conversation. It needs to be Isabelle’s decision, when she opens up to you about the loss of her father—if at all, even.” The cricket hands over the book, “Here. Read this one too. It’s on adjusting to adoption.”

Gold gives Archie a curt nod and after a moment adds, “Thank you, Dr. Hopper.”

The men are silent for a few minutes before the psychiatrist speaks up, in his stuttering and awkward manner, “You know, I was surprised,” he begins, but pauses to clear his throat, “when I heard you were taking her, that is.”

The pawnbroker scoffs, “Not the only one.”

Surprisingly, Archie laughs—though haltingly. “Usually, the state foster system offers resources to new guardians, but with Storybrooke being so small as to not even warrant an office, it must feel like you’re rather on your own in this.”

Gold frowns, “Is there a point to this line of reasoning, doctor?”

“It’s just that I want you to know if there’s ever anything you need,” the man stammers, but gains confidence as he continues, “any questions, or—or simply want to talk, know that I’m here—that is to say, I could be a resource, should you ever find yourself in need.”

Mr. Gold blinks, mouth gaping, taken completely unawares. Rumpelstiltskin had always been so good at reading and anticipating the cricket, but not this time it would seem. “I—“ he stops, unsure of himself, for once, “I thank you, doctor. I’ll keep that in mind.” After that, Gold bids the man goodbye and takes his Belle home.

As soon as he’s fed her dinner and put her to bed, he stays up late into the night, reading over the pamphlet from the cricket:

**_The five stages of grief, not always chronological in order, neither limited to nor experienced in a set time period—they vary on a case by case basis. Grief is as individual and unique as the person experiencing it. The five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance, are expressed by those bereaved in both the verbal and non-verbal. Emotional outbursts, tantrums, and despondency can all be common. Spanning weeks, months, and even years, the most important task of those caring for the aggrieved, is support—do not rush the process; it is imperative that the stages be allowed to occur naturally!_ **

Gold sets down the paper, sighing. He slips off his reading glasses and rubs his eyes. They had a long road ahead of them, it would seem.

* * *

**_Denial: a conscious or unconscious refusal to accept facts, information, or the reality of the situation; a temporary defense mechanism._ **

Some days pass them by, the strange pair, easier than others.

Soon after her arrival, Gold realizes that a few changes need occur in the pink house. She reads the books she’s brought with her, but excepting the collection of encyclopedias and atlases found on the living room shelves, Belle runs out of fiction to fill and distract her mind almost immediately.

The dealmaker quickly comes to an arrangement with the local bookstore owner to be his personal shopper, supplying them with a monthly stock of paper backs and hard bound alike—all challenging reads, but accessible to her mind (he catches himself almost saying that she’ll grow into them).

On good days, Gold arrives home to her reading on the couch or in the kitchen, dead to the world. Their evenings then pass quietly and both live to see another identical day. He can’t say he likes those stable, predictable days (but neither can he say that they make him unhappy).

On the bad however, he generally can’t find her without some measure of effort and trouble on his part. At best, Belle’s tucked herself away into some tiny corner or hide-y hole, reading, someplace she finds warmer, safer, and quieter—beside the couch, or in the cabinet under the sink, perhaps.

One day, he can’t find her at all.

Gold scours the house, and he does not even notice when his knee howls in protest at his frantic, harried movements. An hour, passes, and still he cannot find her. He fears the worst: that the queen’s meddled yet again, made her move on the chess board against his pawn (who is really a queen in the guise of youth and innocence, but with the potential to know all the moves on the board given time and autonomy). He’s putting on his coat once again to storm the castle for his Belle—this time at least he could save her—-when a sight outside the kitchen window forces him to do a double take.

Belle stands out in the rain, little warmer than freezing, at the edge of the treeline of the forest.

He rushes out the backdoor to her, across the soaked ground; he notes that she’s barefoot and wears little more than a summer playsuit of white linen. “Isabelle! Isabelle!” he calls out to her, but she does not turn around. She stands, perfectly still, face heavenward, palms open catching raindrops. “Isabelle, dearie?” he calls to her again, coming to stand beside her.

Still, she makes no show of noticing him.

“Belle?” Gold says, the name slipping out, as he puts a hand to her shoulder—it’s cold as ice to his touch. Forgetting himself, he takes both her shoulders and shakes her, fearful at her silence and empty eyes. “ _Belle!_ ”

Suddenly, she shakes her head, slowly, blinking her eyes up at him. “Mr. Gold?” she asks, confused—as if she’s no idea if she knows him at all.

“Belle, gods, you scared me half to death!” Still maintaining his hold on her shoulders, he asks, “What’s the meaning of you standing out here in the cold without shoes and clothes?”

The little girl, blinks again, his words taking their time to travel from her ear canal to her brain for translation. At long last she shrugs and smiles, saying pleasantly, “I missed the rain.”

Gold opens his mouth to say more, to reprimand her and demand that she’s not to ever scare him like that again, but suddenly he remembers the cricket’s warning to patience. The monster in man’s clothing stops himself, “Well, you’ve certainly seen enough for today, dearie.” He takes off his coat and drapes it around her slight shoulders before ushering the frozen stray back inside the pink house. She’s a wee thing, his Belle, for the coat drags the ground as they walk; Gold doesn’t mind in the least.

* * *

**_Anger: manifesting itself in different ways, anger can be directed toward themselves, or others around them; characterize by bouts rage and even violence._ **

Gold soon learns that Belle hates the dentist.

He also subsequently learns that he himself does not like the dentist. In the kitchen the Saturday morning of their two back-to-back appointments, Gold’s tongue plays with his false tooth. He’s never been to the dentist, but the curse, always at the ready, provides more than enough false memories to fill him with fear.

“Do I have to go?” she asks, slouched and clearly unhappy at the table.

Straightening up, he puts away the cowardice, “Aye, dearie, you have to go.” Sighing, he remembers how this must work: he’d have to play-act bravery he didn’t have so that the child wouldn’t fear any more than need be. All the same, his tongue still plays with the gold prosthesis, the sound of drills and other metal utensils dancing in his head, “We have to go.”

Later that afternoon, he finds his misgivings having been for nothing, the teeth cleaning tolerable, only on the minor side of uncomfortable, the whirring sound of machinery causing little jolts all the way to his bad knee, but over soon enough. However, one person does not fare as well for the visit: the dentist.

While having a cavity filled, his little monster had bitten the man. Belle had sharp teeth, cutting through the latex gloves and drawing blood. As well as co-pay, Gold leaves a fifty dollar tip for the poor, unfortunate doctor—and the doctor’s poor, unfortunate swollen finger.

“I told you I didn’t want to go,” she mumbles once they’re finally out the door.

Gold can’t find it in himself to be angry over the incident. He smirks as they walk out of the office, hand in hand, more bemused at his little Belle finally showing some of her spunk he knows her to possess—as well as bravery.

* * *

**_Bargaining: an attempt to regain control through attempts at deal-making and negotiation; an effort to maintain power over one’s life and surrounding circumstances._ **

On sick days, when Belle stays home from school, wrapped up in flannel pajamas and a mountain of blankets on the couch by the fire, Gold does not open shop, instead staying home to keep watch over her—as well as keep her company.

He cooks her thin soup, and sits with her as the outdated stereo plays a scratched record of children’s tales.  When that runs out, he fishes a deck of cards out from a box in the hall closet and they play go-fish.

The little game lasts all of a half an hour, before Gold drops his cards, putting a hand to his head. “Dearie, I can’t.”

Belle nods, frowning. “It’s okay,” the bigger person of the two says.

He sighs, and taking in the sight of her flushed face, and wet hair from her fever breaking intermittently before building again, he instantly regrets himself, “No, it’s not, but the game’s absurd.” Gold gathers up the deck, and Belle passes him the box, but he surprises her when he does not put the cards away neatly. Instead, he sets the box to the side and shuffles the cards with dexterous hands. “Let me teach you a real game or two.”

They play gin rummy, which becomes her favorite, but Belle often acquiesces to a few rounds of Blackjack or Poker, the latter being his favorite. He’s good, and often wins (for he never  _lets_  her win—what kind of lesson would that be? Not to mention, if she could brave and beat him, more the better she’d be prepared for the rest of the cruel world outside this new incarnation of his Dark Castle), but Belle’s a fast learner, and he likes losing to her almost—perhaps even more—than winning.

She’s not as strong in this world, however. She wears out quickly, from youth or curse, he knows not. When she tires, and curls up on the couch, fighting sleep and trying to finish a new book he’s brought home to raise her spirits, his next actions are only natural.

Gold plucks the book from her tiny, tired hands, and when she starts to sit up to protest, he gently pushes her back down, “Now, dearie, don’t be ridiculous.” She frowns up at him, so he explains it to her, “I’ll do the reading.”

In the old world he did not read to his son—couldn’t, being the illiterate, uneducated, impoverished,  _weakling_  excuse for a father. Didn’t mean he didn’t want to.

He reads until she falls asleep, but for the rest of week illness keeps her from school (though, perhaps Friday she would have been well enough to attend. That final day absent seems trifling to Gold’s mind, might as well give her the whole of the week, he decides), Belle instead of reading to herself silently, passes her books to his hands to be read in his low, droning voice. Gold raises an eyebrow, but accepts the books all the same.

He reads her many things, covering a wide range of subjects. He reads her stories and histories, literature and poetry. He finds she likes Lang’s Blue Fairy Book of course, as well as anything with a proper rhyme scheme. He pushes Yeats, Eliot, and Burns, and others, steering her toward the British Isles. He reads her Lewis and Tolkien, Pullman and Barrie, even tackles a little Shakespeare. The pair makes significant headway through Homer and Virgil (she likes the characters Iphigenia, Andromache, and Dido. None of these surprise him and all set alarm bells in his head ringing).

At her request, he reads her Dante when she brings it to him, and subsequently worries at her unwavering interest and the speed at which she grasps the political and religious allegory, his little Beatrice.

Gold soon realizes that perhaps due to her age, she takes the meaning from these dense texts primarily from his tone and inflection, but her youthful mind and ear quickly becomes attuned to the metaphoric language of the poets and myth makers. An idea begins to bloom. He thinks that he could make the most of these young years and give her an early understanding of the mystery and layers of the law codes of this world; he adds legal tomes and law reviews to their reading regimen.

“Now, don’t look at me like that,” he says, when Belle makes a face, spotting the cover of the law review. “Come now, dearie, it’s just another kind of tale—if you can listen long enough to find it.”

She takes the bait, his brave little baby girl, and listens to four supreme court cases before falling asleep again. The next day when she asks him if he’ll read her the one about the Cuban fishermen and their boat named Lola, he knows he’s succeeded. Smiling to himself, he opens the dusty book and reads her case 175 U.S. 677,  _the Paquete Habana._

When he reads her Buck’s  _The Good Earth_ , knowing Belle would of course love the adventuring intellectual authoress, and her interest in Asia is piqued instantly. Gold digs up a box of eastern classics from the storage closet in the shop. Together they begin to go through a collection of the Four Great Classical Novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the ancient Indian epic  _Ramayana_ , and the first novel, the Japanese  _Tale of Genji_ (though he stops after Genji takes little Murasaki away from her village—the fiction a shade too close to their life inside the safe, pink house).

Belle once again delights in the foreign and exotic, lands spiced with silk and intrigue. He brings her a fan, gifting it to her for the second time, the scene depicting the snowcapped, red rooftops of the imperial residence.  She stares in awe, folding and unfolding the token. “I want to see it some day,” her hoarse voice whispers, in wonder (though she has, once before—or the mystic lands of the Orient in their dead and havoced world rather).

“One day you will,” he promises, and he means it. His Belle wants so much more than Regina’s bastardized curse has planned for her, and he intends on seeing to it that she gets it and more.

* * *

**_Depression: an understanding of the inevitability of the situation and loss; characterized through many different expressions of grief, including, but not limited to crying, silence, solitude and a disconnecting from loved ones._ **

It takes him weeks to notice Belle sleeps an excessive amount of time, that fall.

At first he shrugs it off to her age, she’s a baby, after all. Later, to that little bout of illness they’d faced together (with surprising joviality), but finally he realizes the amount of time is simply not normal.

The final realization comes with the fact that she rarely sleeps in a bed, only when driven to near-complete exhaustion. Rather, he finds her asleep all over the house, on the couch, curled up on rugs, or in various armchairs and rockers, dead to the world. He resigns himself to simply covering her with a thick blanket—for his knee won’t allow him to carry her to her proper bed.

When he returns home, business keeping him later than usual, to find her asleep under the his desk in the office study, Gold decides it can go on no longer.

“It’s her body coping,” Archie tells him, when Belle finally wears him down and he can’t deal with the fear that there’s something wrong (and Doctor Whale tells him shortly that there’s nothing physically wrong with her). “It’s a good sign,” the psychiatrist says. “This is a big change. She needs the sleep, both physically, and mentally too, for that matter. Isabelle needs the rest to adjust to her new life.”

“But what can I  _do_?” he asks the cricket helplessly.

“You’re doing everything you can, it seems like. Keep her involved, keep communicating, when she’s receptive to it.” The doctor smiles at him, sadly, “That’s all you can do.”

That night, he returns to the pink house to find her fast asleep on the floor, he simply stands for a moment, looking down at his ward. She has chosen her place with care, her precious encyclopedias open and arranged in a haphazard, protective circle all around her. Gold meticulously closes them, slipping a facial tissue—the closest placeholder he can find on such short notice—and stacks them on the coffee table. He then tucks a cover around her and leaves her till the morning.

The next day he proposes a trip to the library, weekly, followed by tea at Granny’s. He does this, as well as endeavoring to make her play and stay active. He takes her on walks in the woods and through the town. He coaxes her appetite with treats and any cooking other than his own (for he’s had to deal with his own cooking for years—it’s passable at best).

He’d give her the world, wants to give her everything he wanted to but had not the means to give Baelfire. However, he checks himself; he’ll not spoil her. Rather, he’d do his best to raise her up properly, that is to bring her up to be herself, to be Belle (at times he thinks that an inevitability, a matter entirely out of his hands, but then he remembers the woods and his desk and knows there’s raising still yet to be done—still yet to be potentially ruined).

She still sleeps too much and smiles too little, but the weekly trips usually boast a few of her rare smiles and even rarer laughs, a book clutched to her chest or a teacup at her lips, and he’s satisfied for the time being.

* * *

**_Acceptance: the final stage, individuals begin to come to terms with their loss and gain an understanding that life continues in spite of tragedy._ **

Gold loses his composure the day he returns home from the shop to find her in her room, sobbing, face hidden in her pillows, trying to hide the sound—she’s not one to cry in the daylight, openly before him. Even when the sound of his cane on the floor alerts her to his entrance, Belle does not stop crying.

“Dearie, what’s happened? What’s the matter?” he asks, putting a hand to her shaking shoulder.

Belle does not answer, instead thrusting a piece of paper to him. Gold takes the curious item. Through her tears, he barely makes out her words, “You have to sign it.”

He looks down at the page. It’s a report card. At first nothing’s amiss, her marks nigh on perfection, but then he spots the offending article—the out of place grade that most certainly does not match the others: Belle received a low mark in maths.

Extremely low.

Gold sighs, and folding up the card, he slips it into his jacket to be dealt with later; he’s more pressing matters at hand. He takes a seat on the edge of her bed, and placing a tentative hand on her back (for he avoids touch—they speak often but rarely do they ever touch, even when passing plates during dinner and going about other mundane tasks around the pink house), he says, “Now, now, dear. We can set this right.”

She looks up slowly, rubbing her palm into her eyes, red from crying, “What do’ya mean?”

“I mean, there’s always a solution to be found—but only when one stops to think rationally. Do you think you can do that?” he asks, only a touch stern. “Think you’re calm enough to work this little problem out with me?”

She bobs her head and hiccupping just once, answers, “I think so.”

Frowning, Gold takes out his pocket square, “Here, wipe your face, Belle.” Once she’s done as he’s told her, he continues, “It would seem mathematics are not your strong suit, dearie; we just need to figure out how to fix that.”

She nods, smiling up at him. There’s hope in her expression, as well as trust (and more than a shadow of her former self; she’d always been too trusting, his bartered housekeeper).

Forcing himself to see the little girl and not the ghost, Gold focuses on the present and outlines a plan to his young charge: together they would go over her lessons, every day after school, and together work on her homework. What’s more there is to be no reading for pleasure until after all the equations are completed. In addition, he’d speak with her teacher about any chance at extra credit, to help bring up her marks before the next evaluation period.

“Are we in agreement?” he asks—because since the day he brought her home (both of them), he’s set a precedent of letting her decisions, her fate, be her own.

Belle nods, tears forgotten. All the same, she takes her time, answering seriously, “Yeah, I can do that.”

It’s a hard set of weeks, for truly, she’s no head for numbers, and more than once he loses his patience, or she loses hers and plenty of evenings end in tears, but slowly, Belle improves.

When he finally comes home to her waiting in the living room, he immediately knows something to be amiss; she holds a book in her hands, but pays no attention to the text. “Evening, dearie,” he says mischievously.

“Hi,” she says, forcing herself to look down and turn a page.

“How was school today?” he asks, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth.

She looks up and shrugs, a smile also playing at hers.

He chuckles. “Alright then.” He leaves her, but hears her attempts at tip-toeing not far behind. She follows him all the way to his study, where he spots the exam waiting for him on his desk. He looks to the doorway, and her head pops back behind the frame. “Whatever can this be?” Gold picks it up, taking his time to slip on his glasses—he already guesses at what it says.

The test’s almost perfect, for she’d only missed three equations.

After congratulating her, he leads her back down to the kitchen, where he promptly hangs the exam sheet on the refrigerator in a place of prominence. “You should be very proud of yourself, Belle.”

Gold turns to her, but finds the child looking up at him with a strange expression. He can’t call it unhappy, doesn’t know what to call it exactly (however, just as her mouth opens to speak, the word  _yearning_  comes to mind).

“And you?” she whispers.

“Aye, dearie,” he tells her as she looks up at him beaming, his mind thinking over the difference a year makes, the distance between shy, guarded ambivalence and smiles of curious, caring interest (Belle still wants to know him in this world too, it would seem). “I’m proud of you too.”


	3. Part 1: Crooked Nails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A nine-year-old Belle finds Baelfire’s room

Mr. Gold did not plan for this. He should have, because she’s nine and he remembers this age. They’re curious creatures at this stage, even without the intrigue of an entirely new world to explore piquing their interest. The thought had just never occurred to him. So he has not planned for her finding it.

Belle is nine when finds Baelfire’s room.

False, she finds the room the curse designated as Baelfire’s—it is not filled with his son’s true possessions (those are tucked safely away in a trunk in the backroom of the shop), nor did his son ever live in this place, but even so, there’s power in it.

Of course, he loses his temper.

He comes upon the opened door. He’d just gotten home from the shop, and when he hadn’t found her in the living room, reading or in the kitchen, working on homework at the table, he’d thought her off to the library or local park—apparently not. She stands in the middle of the room, holding a framed, school portrait of his son that was never taken. He stalks in and yanks it out of her hands, “Give me that.”

Belle, sill in uniform, jumps back, but not far. “I’m sorry.”

He frowns at her, and then, takes a quick look down at the photo. Gold has not seen it in some time, neither his memory, nor his resolve, needing the reminder. His son’s smiling face chips at the stonewall holding back the ocean that is his pain. “I did not give you permission to be in here,” he says, coldly.

The little girl looks up at him frowning, and in a quiet but firm voice says, “Didn’t say I couldn’t.”

The pawnbroker looks up from the photograph, scowling. Her words are true, for some habits die hard and as in the Dark Castle, he had not stipulated any restrictions on rooms and movement. She is too smart for her own good, even at this age. “I didn’t know you were a snoop, Miss French,” he clips down at her, knowing she doesn’t like it when he calls her by her surname.

Mr. Gold moves to return the photo to the wall above the boy’s desk, scattered with papers and drawings and a few comic books. The things in the room, as well as the clothes, are not new, fit for a poorer boy, even in this world, the curse knows him well. From the frame, Bae’s smile taunts him—offering forgiveness he, the coward, does not deserve.

“Who is he?” Belle asks.

Gold turns, shocked. He’d almost forgotten she stood there, all of nine years old—younger than his Baelfire, but just as brave. “My son,” he says. “He was my son.”

Belle nods, and looking about the room slowly, continues, “What happened? Where is he?”

He knows the next words by heart, “I lost him.”

Her eyes narrow and a little crease finds place between her brows—one he knows will deepen with time, but not in an un-pretty way. He wonders if she’ll play her part in this little script—though they are running it many, many scenes too early.

_I’m sorry._

But this Belle, this little orphaned waif knows how hollow that consolation sounds. Instead she asks, “What was his name?”

Gold is taken back; he had not expected that question. Questions about the nature of the loss, how, when and, most frighteningly, why, but not something so simple as a name, though Rumpelstiltskin knows well enough the power of names. At length, he answers, giving a truth that will make sense in this world, “His name was Bae.”

Belle smiles at that, turning to the desk, and thereby Mr. Gold. Crossing her arms over her chest, the child says, “That sounds right.”

“Right?”

“Mhm,” she rocks on her heels, eyes again flitting about the room, “matches his face.” Belle stops suddenly. Standing perfectly still, looking up at him, she says, “I’m sorry I made you sad.” Not, I’m sorry you lost him—for there’s no sorry that can replace a lost loved one, as she well knows. “I won’t come in here again.”

Her face is heavy with honest remorse, and Gold suddenly feels guilty. “Not your fault, dearie. It’s mine,” he motions toward the door, but once in the hallway, after closing the door behind them both, he says, “You can go in again—but don’t move anything about, alright?” he eyes her.

Belle nods, “I won’t.”

“Okay then, let’s go downstairs and see about dinner.”

* * *

He thinks the incident forgotten, has tried himself to put it far out of mind as quickly as possible, but Gold would be lying if he said it didn’t distract him. Perhaps that’s why her request during dinner a few nights later catches him completely off-guard.

“I want to go home.”

He looks up, startled, into her calm face, round and heart-shaped, the vestiges of baby-fat still present for a few years more. “Dearie,” he starts off, with pity in his voice. Pity and regret.

“No,” she says, recognizing the tone—if any should be able to recognize pity, it is Belle. “I need to go to my house. Forgot something.”

Oh, she means literally. “Yes, dearie, of course,” he offers immediately.

She doesn’t smile at getting her way, but nods in appreciation. Gold watches, still surprised at the request, as she picks up her glass of milk with both hands and takes a drink, afterward wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Don’t do that; napkin, remember?” Though he knows she has one from earlier in the evening, he hands her another across the table. Belle takes it without argument.

* * *

He takes her back to her home that Saturday afternoon.

After the accident, Gold, as holder to most of the French deeds, had sold most of the family’s minimal estate. The family truck (not the totaled shop van that had been bought on loan. That had been a lost cause) and florist shop, but he’d not had the heart to sell their house,  _her_ house.

The pair drives across town in his Cadillac, silent. The ease between them coming and going, and today, what with their destination, ease has most certainly gone from both parties. They pull up in front of the old, white house with blue shutters. It has a picket fence and is picturesque—yes, he could see Belle having spent her youth and adolescence in a place such as this, and even in its mild disrepair (though in better condition than when Moe had been tasked with the keeping), Gold is pleased that the curse had been kind to the little family, in this one way.

Up until the father had bought a van from one with money and experience,  _who should have known better_ , and allowed tragedy to catch them up.

After unlocking the door for her, he stands aside and allows Belle to lead the way. She looks skittish, as if about to bolt, though whether away or in deeper, Gold cannot tell. Instead she walks slowly through the dead air of the closed-up house, entering a quaint sitting room, one he’s examined at some length, as well as the rest of the house, months ago.

Belle, singular in purpose, stops before a worn piano. She untucks the bench and with precision of one who has done so in the past and been at home in a particular place, she wipes the dust from the seat, depositing it from her hands to her pant legs—the makings of a clean and meticulous girl, but still a girl with sticky, child’s hands and moments of whims acted upon. Belle climbs up onto the bench and leaning over the piano, she takes a hanging picture from the wall—Gold knows it to be a family portrait. That too, after she gets down, she dusts with the corner of her pink shirt.

He almost says that he could have gotten it, being the taller of the two, but then stops himself, for this isn’t his house, no matter what a single legal document says filed away in his office. Nor is it his family portrait.

She turns to him, but stares down at the floor between them, the picture clasped to her chest. “Okay, we can go.”

“You’re sure? Nothing else you want?” he fumbles. “A look about your room, perhaps?”

Belle shakes her head, still staring at the worn and matted carpeting (shag—the house is rather old, after all).

Mr. Gold sighs, “Alright, dearie. Come on then.” Again, he allows her to walk through the doorway first, and after he padlocks the door shutting up the place, once more. Belle does not look back at her house, instead, she sits, waiting for him in the Cadillac, arms still wrapped around the picture.

The drive is naturally most uncomfortable. Gold thinks on the past few months, her speedy adjustment. He endeavored so hard to keep reminders of her past, and the inevitable pain tied to them, away, but perhaps that wasn’t the proper way to go about things. He remembers back, a lifetime ago, how after losing Bae, from time to time, he’d still sit about in the magically transported room in the Dark Castle from their old peasant home and life and just  _remember_. “You know,” he begins, “we can come back—any time you’d like.” He sneaks a look at her across the vehicle. “You could enjoy your things.”

Belle looks up at him, surprised, and then wide eyed and perhaps more than a little hopeful, she says, “That’d be okay.”

* * *

When they return to the pink house, she takes the portrait and sets it on her desk, but he hears her rustling about in there for hours afterward, and over the next few days, the French family portrait moves from desk to window seat to bed to downstairs in the kitchen to back upstairs in her little bathroom, and who knew how many places in between.

When he finds her in the sitting room, holding the portrait, he decides to breach the topic. First, of course, he makes them tea. “Having trouble finding it a home,” he asks, carrying the tea tray; he winces when her round eyes look up, startled from her thoughts, regretting the word choice.

However, Belle does not yell at him for his insensitivity, being a child and generally taking adult’s actions as the way of things and her subsequent feelings the problem (Gold didn’t much like that part and was working on letting her know so). She nods, looking down to the smiling faces. “Everywhere I put it, it looks  _wrong_.” After a moment, the child adds, “and it makes me sad.”

He understands that so well. Isn’t that why he locked away Bae and the memories in that little room of falsehoods, banished them along with his pain and remorse into exile in that modern-day oubliette, so they wouldn’t hurt him, sharps as they are?

“Perhaps someplace not so visible,” Gold offers, and she instantly gives him a dirty look—one that he’s seen in the mirror and wonders how she picked it up so fast. “In sight, of course, but just not something you’ll see all the time,” he amends. “There’s a place for grief,” he says, taking his time with the suggestion, as he stirs his tea, “but we need not hold it so very close.” He says words he knows to be easy enough in theory, but very difficult in practice, he himself still trying to learn.

A moment passes before Belle nods, and after taking a loud sip from her own cup, she asks, “Then where should I put it?”

Mr. Gold thinks for a moment: where did one put a tragedies to heavy to hold and too important to let go? “The foyer perhaps?” They didn’t often sit in there, but crossed it on occasion, if they went to their instruments, and that had a nice parity to it.

Belle thinks over the idea, looking from ceiling to picture. “Okay, can I have a hammer and a nail?” she says, innocently.

“You know how to use one?” he asks, instruction coloring the question.

She shakes her head. Well then, he’d have to fix that. Finishing his tea, he stands. “Come on, I’ll show you.” He bids her pick a spot on the wall, while he goes to rummage in the garage for the tool kit. When he comes back, he finds the foyer empty, but thinks nothing of it. As he hears her coming down the stairs, he calls out, “Found a fine spot on the wall, come and see what you think.” Gold turns to find Belle holding not one but two framed photographs—she’s brought down the portrait of Bae.

“I thought since I’d have someone up, you should too.”

At first he wants to bite out,  _no—put that back—don’t ever touch it again_ , but then he swallows and slowly nods to the little, audacious,  _brave_ thing. He turns away hoping she doesn’t see him struggle to stay composed. “Bring that stool over here, dearie.”

She does so, and he shows her how to hold the nail steady with one hand, hammer in the other. He tells her how to avoid her thumb, yet try to use the best amount of force for the most amount of movement in the nail. Gold hammers the first few strokes, and then lets Belle have a try. She bends the first nail beyond use, and he replaces it with a new one, so they can try again. The second time, she bends it only slightly less horribly, and he is able to right it with a few correcting blows. Then, his son—his life, his motivation, his catalyst for initiating the apocalypse of their world—hangs on the wall, smiling in clothes he never wore, in a land he never should have known.

With the next nail, she does a little better. He still has to straighten it out, but two knocks do the trick, and then her dead parents hang below Bae.

He offers a steadying hand, as she climbs off the stool, and stepping back together, they stare at their combined losses, surveying their work. “Thank you,” she says, quietly.

“No matter,” he whispers back.

Next, because they have both had enough grief for the day (or at least enough that any more and one or both of them would surely burst) he says, “Let’s see what to do about dinner, shall we?” Together, they leave the foyer, leaving their grief for another time, to be found in the same place, exactly where they’d left it.


	4. Part 1: Time of Daffodils

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle takes a dare; Gold and Regina make a deal.

Gold learns soon enough that she ages.

He knows it with all himself, in the way her little face changes shape, the way her clothing grows snug, as months move past them in the little pink house, and when winter finally falls away, the spring daffodils begin to bloom, she picks a bouquet (with the good kitchen scissors and she receives a trifling reprimand for it), brings them inside and gifts them to him. A florist’s daughter in this world, he wonders if she means forgiveness with the gesture. 

He puts the flowers in the tall, copper vase, and places them with prominence in his study— _too dark_ , she says,  _they’d let some light in_ , she says. Perhaps she meant hope. (Couldn’t have meant rebirth—though likely to be the most accurate for this scenario).

Perhaps she just meant the bring some yellow into the house, yellow being her favorite color and all; he has to remind himself that she’s a child, a growing child, his little perennial.

Though he’s not sure of the gift’s meaning, Gold is sure that he’s not worthy of it, at any rate.

* * *

Belle’s a funny girl. Different. Not like her classmates.

She knows that. She’s always known that, but being the girl with the dead dad doesn’t help things. First everyone had stayed away, but now, they were coming back. They were coming back to tease her.

She’s walking home, because it’s springtime, and she’d finally gotten Mr. Gold to agree to let her walk home instead of waiting in daycare at school. She hates it there. While walking, at least she could think, or read, if she could balance long enough.

Today she reads. She’d borrowed Mrs. Blanchard’s poetry book. This one had a lot of weird punctuation and parentheses and no capital letters. Belle thought it especially weird a teacher would have a book with bad grammar. She’d have to ask Gold to explain it tonight, if he had time (he almost always had time, or at least time to tell Belle when he would have time).

All the same, the words are very pretty.

So pretty, Belle doesn’t hear the group of students catch her up.

“Look what creepy girl’s doing,” an older boy says, snatching the book out of her hands. 

“Hey!” Belle yells, trying to grab the boy’s arm, but he’s too tall for her. “Give that back!”

The other children laugh. The group makes four altogether, three boys and one girl. She does not know them. They aren’t in her class, but two, she recognizes from a few grades above hers—they’re brother and sister, twins. She can’t remember their names.

“Woah,” the boy says, flipping through the book. “It’s not even a story. Doesn’t have pictures or anything.”

Belle sighs. “No, it’s not a story, just—give it back. It’s not yours!” She jumps to grab the book, but he holds it above her head, out of reach. The rest of the group laughs. “Nuh-uh. You gotta earn it, weirdo.” Without warning he tosses it to the girl, “I dunno, Ava, how do you think she should earn it back?”

“Hm, well since books are for freaks and scared-y cats,” The girl says with a smirk, passing the book to her brother, again out of reach as Belle crosses the circle of bullies, “maybe we should make her prove she’s not a total wuss.”

The group laughs. Her brother pipes up, adding, “Yeah, make her do something scary.”

Belle gulps. She’s always a little scared. Since the crash—and even before. She has awful dreams. Just thinking about them makes her shiver.

The kids laugh. “Look, Nicholas,” the sister says, “she’s scared already!”

The first boy speaks up, “Yeah, Ava. You’re right, let’s see how brave she really is.”

* * *

“Okay, now you know what you have to do?” the oldest boy asks Belle.

She swallows again, her mouth way too dry. “Get into the mayor’s yard, pick an apple, and get back out again.”

“And it doesn’t count unless you come back with an apple,” he reminds her. “Understand?”

Belle peers through a hole in the hedge row surrounding  the edges of the mayor’s huge backyard, “Got it.”

The dark haired boy smirks, “Cool.” The boy weaves his fingers together, making a step for Belle to use to scale the hedge. “You ready?” he asks, and after she nods down to him, he gives a light toss.

Up, and over Belle flies, then down she falls. She lands flat on her front, and coughs, the wind getting knocked from her chest.

“Hey, pst,” the boy says, through the hole in the greenery. “Shut up! You don’t want to get caught, do you?”

Belle shakes her head, forcing herself to breath again, willing herself not to cry. After a moment of silence, the boy speaks up, “hey, you—you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She stands and opens her mouth to answer, but a noise from the house silences her. Belle rushes to hide behind a bush. She peaks through the foliage, to see the mayor, still dressed from the work, step out onto the porch and take a look around her yard. Belle inhales sharply at the sight; the woman terrified her.

Regina narrows her eyes, but finding nothing, goes back inside her large, ostentatious house. The little girl sighs in relief. She slips beneath the bush, to get a better view of the yard. The mayor’s infamous apple tree stands in the center.

The wide open center, without cover, in full view of the many windows.

Belle takes a deep breath. Do the brave thing. Then maybe, just maybe, bravery would follow.

She burrows out from under the bush on elbows and knees—her school uniform will be a mess, and when she hears a snicker from behind, she bets that dumb boy got a look he shouldn’t have gotten. Stupid boy. She’d show him something alright.

Taking one last breath, she stands up fully, breaking into a full run, quiet as she can, straight to the tree. Once to the she reaches it, she spares a glance to the house. Belle sees nothing. Good.

Now hidden behind the trunk, she looks up, and her stomach drops. The nearest apple (ripe, even though all the other leaves are still baby buds, spring only just begun) hangs about a three feet up, out of her reach.

 _Shite_.

Huffing, Belle takes another look to the house. So far, no wicked witch. She thinks fast; she’ll have to climb. Grabbing the lowest branch and placing her foot in a low fork in the trunk, Belle halls herself up.

From this angle she can see inside the mayor’s house. It’s really big—bigger than her old house, bigger than the pink house. So weird that the mayor would live there, all by herself. Belle leans around the edge of the trunk; she can see in the kitchen a big meal cooks. The food looks really good, and she half wishes she could have some—Gold not being the best cook, but still better than her dad. Oddly enough, the meal reminds Belle of her mother. She sighs, a hand going to her necklace, the memento she always wears, before pushing herself to keep climbing (it’s the mayor—why would she, a woman in a big house, cold, mean and by herself, ever remind Belle of anyone as lovely and loving as her mother? Maybe the kids at school were right and there was something wrong with her, thinking a thought like that).

Steadily she makes headway, when suddenly, she hears a loud bang on the window. She freezes, hand midway to grasping the next branch.

The window opens, and Regina yells, “I see you! Stay right there, or else you’ll be sorry, you little vandal!”

Belle hears her high heeled shoes all the way outside, or maybe that’s just her imagination.

“Come on! Get outta there!” The boy yells from outside the yard, behind the fence.

That decides it for Belle. She reaches as far as her arm will go, and then jumps, grabbing the apple, before landing hard, back on the ground. Hearing the mayor throw open the door, she scrambles up, not bothering to cry over the tumble.

“Don’t you run away from me!” the woman’s voice hounds Belle, as she rushes to the gate. “Don’t think I haven’t called the police!”

Not even taking a look back behind her shoulder, she throws open the gate and doesn’t stop. Belle runs all the way to Main Street—heading in no particular direction, but wherever she’s going it’s the same way she’d take if she were going to Gold’s shop—when passing the alley past the library, a hand grabs her arm.

Belle screams, but a hand clamps over her mouth, silencing the sound. “Woah, woah, calm down, Bruce Jenner,” the boy calms her.

“Who?” she asks, when he finally takes away his hand.

“That runner guy—I mean, you did run, pretty fast.”

She looks around, and finds the entire group still there. She’s surprised. She’d expected them to bolt at the first sign of danger. 

They’re all still staring at her. She hates when people stare at her. “I got it,” she says too fast, holding up the apple so they’ll stop looking at her. “I did it.”

Ava takes it from her, “Nice.”

“Wow!” Ava’s brother, Nicholas, says. He none too gently pats Belle on the arm. “I thought you were dead meat, for  _sure_.”

“Yeah, we all did,” the boy says. “That was really cool, though. Nobody’s ever done that—not even Ava.” He takes the apple away from the girl and bites into it. “Here,” the boy says, passing her back Ms. Blanchard’s poetry book. “You definitely earned this. That was pretty brave, what you did.”

Belle smiles, “Thanks.”

In an instant his smile drops, “Hey, what’s that?” he asks, and without warning, touches the little girl’s neck. When he pulls his finger back, she sees there’s blood. She hadn’t noticed the scratch, instead, only hearing her heartbeat in her ears from fear of getting caught by the mayor. “I guess it happened when I jumped down.” She rubs her hand over it, but gasps.

“What? What is it?”

“My necklace,” Belle says, both hands going to her neck, looking for the heirloom piece. “It’s gone,” she whispers, voice cracking. Looking up, she remembers her surroundings, wills herself not to cry, not in front of the others.

“Do you wanna go back?” he asks, looking surprisingly concerned.

Belle takes a peak at the other three. Their faces show fear and apathy. “No. It’s fine.” She shrugs—she could always cry at home, plenty of corners and cubbies in the pink house for that. Plenty of places for reading, or crying, or thinking, so she’s discovered. “I’m fine.”

He nods, and the group continues onward. “You know, you’re not half bad,” he tells Belle, smirking. “My name’s George, by the way,” the tall boy tells her, throwing out a hand for her to shake.

She takes it, smiling, “I’m Isabelle.”

* * *

The scrape and lost necklace do not escape Mr. Gold’s notice—he always notices everything about her—but when question, she’d been extremely tight-lipped about the incident. He’d cleaned and dressed the cut all the same, before sending her off to work on homework, with a word of caution that he’d find out, with or without her help.

His investigation takes little effort. The next morning, he hears gossip in Granny’s about some group of hooligans stealing an apple from Regina’s yard—it already being common knowledge that the local children are in the habit of saying the mayor chopped up those she caught trespassing and used them to fertilize her plants. That particular tall-tale always makes Gold chuckle (strange to think that once the woman had been the most popular in all the lands with children. Strange what tragedy could do to the heart, the holes it could leave behind).

So it comes as no surprise when a week later, the mayor drops by the shop, unannounced.

“Madam Mayor,” Gold says, coming out from the back of the shop, where he’d been working on inventory, passing each item to Belle to dust before returning it to it’s proper place. Since the cut and missing necklace, he’d taken to keeping a closer watch over her during the afternoon and evening hours. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Wasting no time, she strides up the counter, all pristine business attire, of impeccable taste—it’s one change with which Gold takes no issue, preferring the more demure clothing to her provocative wardrobe in the old world. “I was in the neighborhood, and thought I’d stop by, see if you recognized this,” she says, holding Belle’s gold necklace up for him to see.

Mr. Gold frowns, leaning in to the piece to take a closer look. “Fine craftsmanship,” he says without emotion, “but no, it’s not one from the shop.”

Regina rolls her eyes, “No, I doubt it’s from your garage sale excuse for a store front.”

Gold sighs, “How then am I supposed to know from where it comes?” Waving a hand he moves to the counter on the left, to tinker with an antique croquet set. When Regina doesn’t answer immediately, he adds, not bothering to look her in the eyes—he’s sure she’s steadily moving from put-out to livid, “Do tell, I’m all ears.”

“It’s your girl’s, Gold.” She huffs, “I’ll have you know your stray snuck into my yard last week.”

He bristles at her term for his Belle. “You can’t prove that.”

“What’s this look like, hm?” she asks, shaking the necklace. “This proof enough for you?”

He holds up a finger, “Circumstantial, and what’s more, I’m still not convinced that belonged to her in the first.” Gold strolls out from behind the counter, moving to stand between Regina and the doorway to the backroom—just to be on the safe side. “So if there’s nothing you wanted, besides to tout evidence that wouldn’t even make it past the first hearing in court, then I ask that you to leave—I’ve a strict No Loitering policy, after all.”

Regina narrows her eyes, lowering the necklace, “That’s not the only reason I’m here.”

“Oh really?” He asks, a touch worried, but then he notes her expression— _desperate_. “You want something,” he says slowly, “but the question is what.”

The queen strolls regal about the shop, feigning indifference (and failing miserably). “Word around town is that you help people with difficult requests.” She pauses beneath the glass, unicorn mobile. She gently toys with the lowest hanging piece. “I have a difficult request.”

He smirks—she’s come to him, at last, as he always knew she would. “You want a child.”

“Yes.”

Now to play out the proper song and dance for the queen holding court, “And you want _me_ to procure it?” He chuckles, shaking his head, “What’s this shop look like, Mayor Mills? You think I’ve more than one orphan locked away in storage, hm?”

Regina growls at him, “Don’t play games with me. I know you can do this.”

“Yes, I could, but why come to me, dearie? Adoption agency’s right down the street.”

“Do I look like a prime candidate to you?” she confesses, gesturing to herself. “I’m unmarried, single, and work a full time job. There’s no way they’d ever give  _me_ child.”

“Ah, so you’re pursuing less… _conventional_ means.”

“Yes—so—“ and she stops, her expression filled with unexpected emotion, “you’ll do it?”

“Yes,” Gold says, smirk visible, because he can’t bloody help himself, “but it’s going to cost you.”

* * *

They go over the terms of the adoption quickly enough. Regina wants it to be done perfectly legally (though he knows how to do things perfectly legally while still leaving holes to be jumped through at a later date, should the need arise—Dark One and lawyer are not such a stretch, after all).

His price is outrageous, of course, with strings attached and little favors tucked away. He likes having power over Regina, even this little measure, small enough to not alarm her to his immunity from the curse of his creation. In the end, the initial document he has her sign, which includes a small fee for the initial cost of his efforts, is drafted in less than half an hour.

Before handing her the document, he pulls it back at the last moment. “Ah—not so fast, Madam Mayor. I’ll be needing one last thing, as the initial down payment.”

Regina shakes her head, “Always something with you—you’re already taking me to the cleaners on this. What else do you want?”

“That,” he points to her jacket pocket, where she’d tucked away Belle’s trinket. “The necklace. I want it.”

She laughs, “Getting sentimental already, are we?” She pulls the adornment from her pocket, and examines it herself. “Pretty, even if it is rather beat up.” Still staring at the necklace, Regina asks, “How is she?”

Gold sighs, “Well enough, considering.”

Then, as if registering her tone, she turns her voice mocking, ““Yes—considering, it can’t be easy living with mean, old Mr. Gold. You two thick as thieves yet?” She looks up, smirking, to see him frown. “So, no, not yet, I take it.” The woman looks down again, lost in thought, and the dealmaker wonders how she can look so old and at the same time so very, very young. She scoffs, and says, not entirely without care, “the loss of a father isn’t an easy trial to go through; I sympathize with her.”

At the kindness in her voice, he wonders for a brief instant if Regina’s not learning,  _growing_ —that being the goal of living, after all.

Then his face hardens, and he remembers she brought back her own father to kill again him for a curse. Yes, not an easy trial in the least—she should know, having endured it not once, but twice. Regina doesn’t learn; Regina doesn’t grow ( _Regina doesn’t live_ ).

Regina festers.

“And the loss of a mother?” he asks, poking at only the open wound he can reach.

Regina scowls, “I wouldn’t know.” She signs her name with an angry scratch of his outlandishly, expensive pen, and Gold wonders how many copies of town documents she rips when signing them in a fowl mood. She pushes the necklace into his chest. “Keep your brat off my property,” she sneers, before rushing out the door, “I’ll be back about our deal.”

After the door slams, he says under his breath, “Oh, I’m sure you will, Regina. I’m sure you will.”

* * *

That evening he takes a tumbler of scotch out onto one of the balconies, the weather finally agreeable enough to allow his knee to endure the evenings. He sips leisurely, contemplating his coming decision. It’s one he’s already made, his choice to condemn the child of the savior to growing beneath the queen’s thumb. It pains him to do it, but the curse must be broken, and no amount of remorse, no amount of weak and cowardly sympathy will make him turn back now.

Through his thoughts, Gold does not hear the door open.

“You’re going to help her, aren’t you?”

He startles at Belle’s voice, her accusation. He turns from the balcony railing to see the little child staring at him, with knowing, aging eyes. She’s older than her years—always was. What’s more she  _knows_ him. “Aye, dearie. I am.”

“What’s she want you to get her?”

“That, m’dear, is not for you to know,” he says, flicking a finger under her chin. She wrinkles her nose at the disliked gesture. Gold pulls back, raising himself to his full height—he’d never impose more proximity than that with which she’s comfortable. “Rest assured, however, that it will not be at any expense of yours, dearie.”

Belle nods, and when the wind picks up, reminding them how new the season is, she rubs at her bare arms.

“Come along, it’s late. Can’t have you catching cold, now? Can we?” He ushers her inside, a hand to the back of her head. “That reminds me,” Gold tells her, and crooking a finger, beckons her follow him to his study. “Someone’s been sneaking about in yard’s not their own, I think.”

He takes a seat at his desk, giving her a raised eyebrow and pointed look, as she stands at attention across the desk. “Well?” he prompts, when she does not answer the charges.

Belle looks up, “Yeah. Is she mad?”

Gold scoffs, “Always. Now, you’re not to be trespassing again, you could have very easily gotten caught, or worse, hurt.” He slips on his reading glasses, planning to work on a few contracts after he sends Belle to bed. “And what were you doing in Regina Mills’ backyard, I wonder?”

“It was a dare.”

“I see. Children never change, it would seem.” He shakes his head, “Everyone calls me frightening, but in this town, mine’s not the yard that needs worry over if you’re caught trespassing. If you do it again, Belle, there will be serious consequences, you hear me?” Gold’s not thought up said consequences, but he will. He will, if he must.

She nods, “I won’t.”

“Ah,” he holds, “Don’t lie. If you’re going to promise, then mean it. I’ll not have a liar under my roof.”

Belle takes a moment, absorbing his words, before nodding again. “I mean it. I won’t sneak into other people’s yards again.”

“Good.” He smiles, still a touch menacing, but softens after a few moments. “Now that that’s sorted. I believe,” he pauses to pull the golden bauble from one of the desk drawers, “you’ll recognize this.” He holds it up for her inspection. Belle gasps at the sight. “Yours, I think.”

“My necklace. I thought it was gone forever.”

“Not forever, just a week, as it were.” Gold looks over the item once again, though he already knows it well. “It’s a fine thing, your mother’s I assume?” She nods, and he waves for her to come and stand before his chair. “Too fine a thing to be lost on a fool’s adventure.” He easily slips the woman-sized adornment around her child’s neck. “Next time, if you’re going to be brave and reckless, do try dress appropriately, m’dear.”

Belle chuckles, softly, surprised at the strange, admonition, serious, yet also light and teasing. Gold soon joins her with his own deep snickering. When they fall silent, he stares at her, willing her to be careful—but knowing she won’t—before he ruffles her hair and points out the door, “Now, off to bed with you.”

She leaves to go, but stops at the door, “You’ll—“ Belle begins, but falters, losing the nerve.

“Yes, dearie?” he says, peering at her from over the top of his glasses.

“Be careful,” she says, embarrassed, “You know, with  _her_.”

Gold blinks surprised, and hardly hears himself reply, in almost a whisper, “I will.”

She smiles, appeased, and runs off to her room for the night. After she’s gone, his little perennial, he of course cannot concentrate. Instead, he leans back in his wide, leather office chair and wonders at her word of caution. He’s never been good at being careful (Rumpelstiltskin was always better at cowardice), but he said he would—and just as he won’t have her lying to him, neither will he lie to her.

Looking at the yellow flowers, in the vase on his desk, he wonders if he can learn to be cautious for his girl—if there’s any hope that he can move past festering like desperate Regina, that he too can grow in this cursed place (and maybe, just maybe, live again). 


	5. Part 1: Neighbors and Other Night Terrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle has nightmares. Ages 9-13.

It is dark and still very much winter—as his knee reminded him daily—when he hears the sound for the first time.

With a jolt, Gold kicks himself awake, and curses as his stinging leg subsequently howls. Disoriented, he wonders at the sound. Intruder? He pulls open the drawer of his nightstand to retrieve his revolver, when he hears it again. The sound is screaming. Screams of a child.

Belle.

He jumps out of bed and grabbing his cane, races to her room; it takes twelve steps from his door to hers. It takes twelve steps too long. Throwing open the door, he looks about, but finds no one, no attacker, only the wee thing, thrashing around on her bed, still shouting unintelligible sounds.

She’s having a nightmare, he realizes.

He limps over and leaning down, places a hand to her shoulder, shaking her gently. “Belle. Belle, wake up. You’re dreaming.” Coming into consciousness, the child jumps, startled. She makes a final yell, before blinking up at Gold, bewildered. “You were dreaming,” he tries to explain.

Her expression changes to one of recognition, and he almost smiles down at her. Then, the little girl begins to cry.

Instantly, Gold is at a loss of what to do, watching her sob. Bae had never been prone to nightmares, so he has no frame of reference for this, no measure of what to do that will ease her pain. Finally, though stilted and uncomfortable, he sits down on the edge of the bed and pulls the sobbing child into his arms. She doesn’t fight, but shockingly enough grasps him around the middle tightly. It takes a moment, but after getting over his surprise at the ferocity of her hold on him, Gold places his own arms around her, and pats her on the back. “There, there,” he comforts. “It was just a dream, dearie. Nothing more.”

It takes some time before Belle’s tears subside into that uncontrollable, child’s whimper, her voice wavering with each little noise. “Better now, dearie?” Gold asks, pulling back enough to look her into her face.

Belle nods, and there is little recognition in her expression, still half-asleep.

No matter. Reaching to the bedside table, he pulls a tissue from the box and wipes her face dry, under her eyes and nose, across each cheek. After throwing away the used tissue into the rubbish bin next, his hand cups her cheek, and he asks her in halting words, rather unsure of himself,  “Do you—want to talk about it—what happened—in the dream?”

She frowns, a tiny line appearing between her eyebrows (so faint in the dark and in her youth, but he knows it will grow much, much deeper in years to come). After a few moments, she whispers, “I was stuck.”

Gold nods a bit more sure and a touch relieved. He’s familiar with that one—or dreams similar enough to it. He cannot move to follow his Baelfire into the portal—this time, both desiring to follow and having the necessary bravery—but his feet won’t move. That particular nightmare plagues him often enough. At least some good comes from his dream; he now can commiserate with her. “Well, that’s not so strange, m’dear.”

“I guess not,” the wee girl says, the final word warping, for her child’s mouth yawns involuntarily over it. She lies back down, and says without thought, in a sleep-addled tone, “I was stuck in a dungeon. It was scary.”

Ah, he’s familiar with that one as well. Familiar with it as only the two of them can be. 

He gives her back another awkward pat, because it’s all he can do, when all he really wants to do is open that dungeon door, break down the castle brick by brick and build her a palace instead, but they’re in another world, and he’s a cripple, and Belle, well, she’s a frightened child. So, he pats her back, smoothes wet hair from her incredibly small, heart-shaped face, and whispers, “It’s over now, dearie. Don’t think on it.” Gold removes her arm from where it’s landed around his midsection and standing, he adds, “Back to sleep now, little thing.”

However, as he bends to take up his cane, Belle reaches forward, grabbing hold of his wrist, “No, don’t go,” the words come out a wail.

“Dearie,” he sighs, frustrated, “it was just a nightmare. You needn’t fear it. Nothing is going to hurt you, dear.” Nothing but a monster masquerading as a man, a beast in a pink house, prone to stealing and failing children, prone to drink and cowardice.

Belle does not let go, and when Gold turns back toward her, he can see the pain in her face. She’s begun to tear up once again (of course, she’s crying. He’d always been so very good at making her cry, after all). “Please, don’t go. I don’t—“ she stutters, trying to voice her fears, but falters, “it’s—“

“Dark. You don’t like the dark, I know.” Gold learned that new change in Belle early on, when she’d only sleep in a bed when completely exhausted, preferring instead to rest midday in the living room, surrounded by his encyclopedia, set in a protective ring all about her.

They stare at one another. One brittle, both broken—both begging, each in their own way.

When Belle sniffles twice, Gold gives in. He sighs, closing his eyes to this, his next terrible decision, and says, “Alright, but just this once, dearie.” He sits back down, her arms return, wrapping around his middle, and after a moment’s hesitation, he wraps an around her, as well. He’s atop the blankets, halfway to sitting upright, the pillows, piled behind his back.

It’s not comfortable in the least; he wouldn’t rather be anyplace else in all the lands.

Pulling back, Gold looks down, asking, “Better?”

Belle does not answer, and after a few seconds of listening to her short, labored breathes, he realizes she’s asleep. He should leave. She’s asleep, no longer plagued by demons of the night, what’s more, he’ll never get a wink of sleep in this position, be completely useless come morning.

But were he to move now, in all likelihood, the movement might very well rouse Belle. Almost assuredly would rouse the girl. Couldn’t have that, now could he?

He stays.

When he wakes, it’s early yet, first light just beginning to stream through her east-facing window. He slips out of her hold (she doesn’t wake), his bones popping and creaking. He holds in a groan of pain, for he’s very stiff. Gold limps the twelve steps back to his own room, and prepares himself for the day, not bothering trying to go back to sleep, for it would be a futile effort.

* * *

“Let’s go back to something you mentioned earlier, about change?”

“I said,” the child shrugs and squirms on the loud, leather-upholstered seat, taking her time,  “nothing ever changes.”

Dr. Hopper tilts his head, “I’m sorry, Belle, you’re going to have to be more specific.”

The blue-eyed child glanced up to the doctor, leaning forward on the couch opposite her own. She lets her legs swing a few times before realizing her own movement— _nervous fidgeting: a weakling’s habit for masking discomfort, and you’re no weakling, dearie_ —she forces her legs to still. She’s no weakling (even if she is uncomfortable). “It’s everyone, in my classes. I…” she sneaks a peek at the clock on the wall before continuing to speak, “change. They don’t.”

Archie nods, “So you think that’s why you’re having trouble making friends, Belle? You think you’re, I don’t know, growing up faster? That you’re more mature, perhaps, than your peers? That’s a very natural feeling, especially for one who has experienced loss, like yourself.”

“It’s hard making friends when I have to, I dunno, start over every year, I guess.” She looks up at the clock again. Fifteen more minutes to go before Gold would take her home. Then, they’d have a few days before she could begin to dread her upcoming appointment with Dr. Hopper, all over again.

“You mean it  _feels_ like you’re starting over, new teacher, new classroom?”

Belle sighs. No, that wasn’t what she meant  _at all_. She looks up at the clock. Twelve minutes to go. “Okay, it feels like starting over.”

* * *

The nightmares do not stop. In fact, if anything, they grow worse.

Gold awakens in the middle of the night to the sound of unholy screams at least once a month, and on rare occasion, as many as three times a week. He rushes to her side, wakes her, comforts her, and lies with her.

After the first few times, he stops his pretense of trying to leave, and simply slips into bed and holds his girl, afraid of the dark, seeking comfort from a monster, who in the morning, she speaks to as an enigma, some strange adult, when she chooses to speak at all (this Belle, broken by tragedy at an early age, keeps all her thoughts to herself, to swirl around in that pretty, little head of hers).

He should not coddle her, but he can’t help it, can hardly deny her anything.

So he stays when she begs him to do so. Stays when she stops begging him to do so, taking it for granted. The next day, his old bones remind him to feel guilty—that the nightmares are his fault in the first place, his payment for locking a princess in a dungeon and then casting her out.

He holds, he comforts, he sleeps. He leaves at first light, before she wakes.

All the while, his Belle grows up in a slumbering town, dreams and all.

* * *

“Nightmares?”

Belle shrugs. He’s looking at her. She knows he’s looking at her. She hates when people look at her. “Mhm.”

“And what are these  _nightmares_ about, exactly?”

She sighs, sinking further into herself, into the ugly couch in Dr. Hopper’s office. She’d mentioned being tired, not having slept much the night before, and when he’d asked why, the honest answer had simply slipped out. Belle regretted that now. “It’s just one, pretty much. Well, not always, but one’s always the worst.”

He jots something down onto the pad of paper he holds. He is always doing that. What he found so interesting in what she had said, Belle couldn’t guess. After all, most adults didn’t really think anything a stupid twelve year old said worth even noting, not to mention taking notes on (excepting, of course, Mr. Gold. He always had time for something Belle wanted to say, even if most the time it was just stupid kid stuff). “Okay. Good,” Archie says, nodding. Finishing a last sentence, he says, “Let’s go with that. Now, what exactly happens in this one dream?”

Belle frowns. She hates the nightmare; why would she want to think about it anymore than she had to? “I’m trapped, not much more happens, really.” Not true, and she hated lying. Hopefully the doctor wouldn’t notice.

“And what’s so frightening about that, being trapped, for you, Belle?”

She sighs, of course he’d keep asking her about this. “It’s scary, because I know bad things will happen, the longer I stay.”

The doctor shakes his head, “Bad things, you say? What do you mean? How do you know this?”

Belle grumbles, frustrated. “I just do, okay.”

“Okay, Isabelle. Calm down. I’m just trying to understand.” Archie takes a deep breath, “I think, it would be easier, if you told me exactly what happens in this dream, don’t you?”

No. No, that wouldn’t help. Wouldn’t help at all. Belle shrugs again, “Maybe.”

“Alright then. Let’s start from the beginning. Where are you?”

Her eyes dart up to the doctor before returning to her lap. “I’m in a dungeon.”

Dr. Hopper scribbles on his pad of paper with a frown. Did he have to keep writing, right now? “Uh huh, and how did you get there? Are you alone in this dungeon?”

Belle shrugs. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know about how you got there, or if you’re alone?”

“Got there.”

“So, you do know if you’re alone? In the dungeon?”

Belle held back another grumble. She hated when he tricked her like that, got an answer when she didn’t want to give up one. “I’m not alone.”

“Who’s there with you? Another… prisoner?”

Belle shakes her head. “Not prisoner. They’re in charge. They keep me locked up.”

“Okay. Someone strong and powerful? That could mean something, Belle. Tell me more about this person in charge.”

If Dr. Hopper wanted her nightmare she would give it to him, even if it made him think she’s weird. No. Not weird, crazy—which everyone knows, is like a million times worse than weird. “It’s the mayor. She keeps me locked up.”

Archie frowns. “The mayor? Now, that’s. Um, a little—“

“Weird. I know, ‘kay.”

“Extreme,” he amends, in the tone she’s come to recognize as his most pitying. She hates that tone, “You’re not weird, Belle.”

Then why was he making that face, she thinks to herself.

Inclining his head toward the hunched figure of a little girl, Archie continues, “But, I think we need to figure out why exactly your subconscious is putting a strong, female figure in power in the role of, well, the role of the villain in your dreams.” He glances up at the clock. “And perhaps, that’s a question you can think about for next week, alright?”

* * *

“Much as I dislike the idea, you’ll be needing to stay late at the good doctor’s tomorrow, after your appointment,” Gold tells her at the dinner table. “There’s a bit of business that will keep me over-long at the shop.” He hardly need remind her, judging by the knowing look she shoots him as he sets down their supper plates.

This happens once in a blue moon, as often as the curse resets itself and the cyclical, Storybrooke citizens. Gold needs stay late to sign away Ashley Boyd’s unborn child, in a dirty, back room deal, presided over by a brooding Mitchell Herman (his son, the crown prince is predictably unaccounted for at these repetitive meetings). On those days, Belle waits in the lobby of Archie Hopper’s practice where she works on her homework, to be picked up an hour or two late—She’s no trouble to Hopper, and Gold does own the property, after all.

It’s a tense half hour, with Belle silently moving the food around on her plate, taking nary a bite. Finally, Gold drops his fork to the plate, huffing, “Well, do you plan on telling me what’s the matter, or are you going to make me guess?”

Belle looks up at him, with her wide eyes, before looking back to her plate, “Do I have to go?”

“Barring illness and inclemet weather, I should presume, yeah, you have to go.”

The mocking tone in his voice sparks her tempter. She looks him in the eye when next she addresses her foster parent, “But I hate it.”

Gold makes an uncomfortable face, and takes the time to wipe his mouth with his cloth napkin before replying, “Dearie, it’s only an hour or two. That’s not so very long.”

“No, all of it. I hate it. I don’t like talking to Dr. Hopper.”

This surprises him, “Why ever not? The doctor’s not been…” he takes a moment, reigning in the idea that if the little pushover has been cross with his Belle in any way, Gold will crush him, exoskeleton or no. That however would not do at all to say out loud, “unkind to you, in anyway? Has he?”

Belle shakes her head, “No. No, he’s really nice. It’s just—“ Her words drop away, and she rolls a mushroom across her plate.

Gold reaches across the table, taking the fork out of her hand and setting it to the side. Pulling away he quickly lifts her chin so she is looking at him again, “You were saying?”

She stares at him, her eyes twice slipping sideways, before she forces them back to meet Gold’s—always his brave little princess. Finally, she explains, “Talking doesn’t help it.”

Gold frowns, thinking of his own misfortunes, of how a lovely young thing had tried her best to talk them away and how much good it had done either of them, “No, I suppose you’re right, dearie. Talking doesn’t always help.”

Belle doesn’t cry, rarely cries (during daylight hours) at all, anymore, but he can see the unshed tears, huge and round, in the corners of her blue, blue eyes, “Please. I don’t want to go anymore. Don’t make me.”

Closing his own eyes, he takes a deep breath, and he knows it’s that  _word_ , as binding to him from her lips, as to Regina from his—curse and contract or no. Of course he says, like that first night months and months ago, “Alright, dearie.” Belle smiles, and Gold smiles back. “Now, finish up before your supper goes cold, child.”

The next day, he calls the chirping psychiatrist to cancel Belle’s appointments. The doctor, though not entirely satisfied with his patient abruptly ending treatment, seems pleased enough at the prospect of only seeing Mr. Gold on rent day.

* * *

News travels fast in a town as small as Storybrooke.

A few days later, the bell in his shop rings, announcing a patron. He looks up and trains his features into a vaguely pleasant expression—difficult considering who has chosen to darken his doorway, “Ah, Regina, to what do I owe the occasion?”

The impeccably dressed woman frowns, “I decided to stop by to check on your progress, with our deal.”

Mr. Gold smirked, “These things take time, dear.” He moves out from behind the counter, tinkering with pieces of his collection on the way, “But worry you not, you’ll have what you want soon enough.” Turning to look his nemesis in the face, he plays the unknowing pawnbroker for her, “After all, it’s not been so very long since we signed the contract. Been, what, a few weeks?”

It’s been close on a year, but with the curse, he’s wouldn’t realize that. The words comfort Regina, apparently enough to bring up her second reason for the visit, “Well, take your time, after all, you shouldn’t neglect your  _other_ responsibilities.”

Gold frowns, “To what responsibilities do you refer, madam mayor?”

Smirking, the woman pulls a manila file from her briefcase, she thumbs through it, slowly, “It would seem that your ward is having a little trouble adjusting.”

He limps over quickly, livid. The dark queen holds his Belle’s file. “Where did you get that?” Gold reaches for it, but Regina pulls it back, out of reach. “That’s none of your business.”

“It’s my business, no, my duty, to protect the best interests of my citizens—that includes her.”

News travels fast when you’re a queen on a mission, apparently.

She flips through it leisurely, tsking her tongue. “I see you’ve pulled her out of therapy. You really think that the best choice?” Regina runs her finger over a highlighted line, and almost to herself, says, “That’s odd.”

With agility that an old, lame small-town loan shark shouldn’t merit, he lunges forward and rips the file from Regina’s manicured hands.

“Hey!” He hopes he gave her a paper cut or five.

Inclining his head, Gold says, “Thank you.”

The mayor glares at him, but after a minute raises her eyebrows and gestures in put-on nonchalance. “Keep a close watch on your girl, Gold. Wouldn’t want anything tragic happening.”

“I assure you, dearie, I’ve agreed to keep watch over this girl forever, and as you know, my agreements are always honored.”

Regina’s eyes narrow, and he wonders if for a moment she suspects him of knowing more than he lets on, but just as quickly she turns on her heel, “Well, I have work to do. Good day, Mr. Gold.”

“I’ll be in touch over our agreement, madam mayor.”

“See that you are,” she says, Regina always liking to have the last word. She slams the door on her way out, jarring with such force that the bell falls to the ground (however, upon inspection, it did not break from the impact).

* * *

A few days later, Gold picks up dinner at Granny’s diner. They appear a touch short staffed and Old Woman Lucas squawks orders and demands at workers and costumers alike. Glad to be on his way, he finds Belle reading at the kitchen table, waiting for him, “Hello, dearie. How was your day at school?”

Belle looks up from her book, “It was good.” She said the sentence too hopeful, and she reigns in the emotion with an ambivalent, “I guess.”

Setting the take-out on the kitchen table, he smirks at her, “You guess? Now, whatever could you mean by that, I wonder.” They stare at one another silently, before Belle hops up to set the table.

Gold, playfully blocks her path with his cane. “Oh no you don’t, out with it. What happened today that has you all flutter?”

She darts around his walking stick, with clumsy but quick child’s steps, “I think, I made a friend.”

“A friend?” Gold knows this to be of some importance. Her teachers have mentioned her reticence at interacting with her peers, and the stolen file he stole back from Regina noted Belle’s antisocial leanings. He can hardly fault the thing, for who wanted to make friends for a year, only to have to do it all over again after the summer holiday? “Do tell, who is this new acquaintance?”

Belle lays out the silverware, while Gold unloads the paper sack. “Says she switched classes. Her name’s Ruby.”

Gold freezes, hand halfway to serving up mashed potatoes onto Belle’s plate.

He should have felt the residual bits of magic, still floating about in the air of Granny’s diner, but the wild atmosphere, all the amnesiac people, had distracted him.

So, he’d worried Regina after all, if she’d deigned to break into her stores of magic this early in the game. In addition, this was no little nudge, a shift in memories. Changing the wolf girl would take a considerable amount of magic. It was wasteful, but apparently the queen was taking no chances, it would seem, in her attempts to keep Rumpelstiltskin hibernating, dormant, below the albeit sharp-edged, but ignorant, Mr. Gold. Couldn’t have the too-smart, dangling toy, the mouse on a string, reminding her kept cat that he lived in an artificial cage, now could she?

Shaking his head, Gold continues to serve them dinner, “That’s lovely, dearie. Glad to hear it.” As they eat, he can’t help but wonder if Regina’s choice of distracting playmate for Belle is no coincidence, and the Lucas girl will prove as wild in youth as she has in adulthood.

He also wonders if twelve is too soon to have the peer pressure talk.

* * *

He should stop. She’s too old for this, but he can’t.

It’s a little after her thirteenth birthday, when he falls asleep with her wrapped around his middle. Halfway through the night, she’s turned away, and he’s followed her, curling himself around her form, hold still innocent, but too close, much too close.

When he awakens and realizes, he sighs, disentangling himself. He’ll stop. He has to stop. He lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering how exactly he’s going to extricate himself from this mess, when belle wakes up.

He stills instantly, for it’s the first that she’s woken up, to him still in her bed. He watches as she rubs her eyes. 

Belle rolls over, blinking at him, “Hi.”

“Hello, dearie.”

She looks uncomfortable for a moment, their faces rather closer than they ever chose to be in the daylight hours. Then she yawns uncontrollably and rolls away from him, sitting up to stretch. He watches her stand, and walk over to her window. She scratches at her hair, wild from sleep, and turning back to him, sitting down at her window seat, she asks, “Will you take me to Ruby’s? She’s got my science book, and I need it for Monday.” 

“Of course, dearie, but after breakfast I think,” he says with a coy smile.

Belle turns back to him, giggling at the early-morning quip. Then, she looks back, watching the midmorning, late Saturday sun rise higher. The weather would be lovely today. “That’s weird.”

“What is, dear?”

“It’s too late for birds, yeah?”

“Yes, A bit, we’ve talked about that saying, you remember, ‘early bird gets the worm’—though I don’t think you much listened to that particular pearl of wisdom, hm?”

She rolls her eyes, “I can get up.”

“Always almost missing breakfast, if I’m not mistaken,” Gold teases her, wondering at the ease with which they’re speaking this morning, if it’s them or the venue to blame. He can’t say he’s unhappy at it. “Why do you ask about the birds, dearie?”

Belle points out the window, “Mrs. Mavis is bird-watching. She’s not gonna see very much this late.”

Gold’s eyes widen. “Bird-watching, what—what do you mean?”

“You know, bird-watching, out the window, got her binoculars and everything.”

Oh the gods, this wasn’t good. He makes no visible change in expression, and instead, replies coldly, “Woman’s always been a fool.” A fool in the queen’s court, apparently. “Mustn’t know her proverbs well as you or I. Be a dear, child, and pull your shades. My old eyes can’t take all that sunlight.”

Belle frowns but does as he orders without question. As soon as Belle finishes, Gold slips out, mumbling something about a late breakfast, determined that yes, he’d put a stop to this—had to.

* * *

He feels as if everyone watches him. Surely, he must be imagining it, for the Mavis woman couldn’t have seen into Belle’s bedroom, and even if she had, what did that prove. Nothing. Proved nothing.

All the same, his paranoia follows him the whole of the afternoon, all the way to the diner, where he swears the Lucas woman stares daggers at him, as they wait for Belle to retrieve her book from Ruby.

On the drive home, Gold decides now or never—and it certainly cannot be never. He brings up the issue. “Belle, we need to discuss something.”

She looks over to him, frowning, “What’s up?”

He shakes his head, her modern colloquialisms still catching him off guard even now, years with her, like this. “It’s about your nightmares, dearie.” He can see out of the corner of his eye that she’s looked down to her lap, embarrassed. He wants to stop, tell her to forget he’d ever brought it up in the daylight, but he can’t, not now. “You—it’s just, you’re too old, for all the crying and the like. You’ve got to learn to comfort yourself.”

She looks up at him, confused, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he pauses, taking a deep breathe to steel himself before speaking in a cruel, harsh threat, “This nightmare nonsense must end, and if you can’t find some way to conquer this, be brave about it, then I think you should talk to the good doctor again. If they’re that serious, that is, that  _disturbing_.”

“No!” she yells, betrayal in her voice, “You can’t mean that.”

“Oh, I mean it. You’re getting older, and you either have to find someway to get over this on your own, or—or I’ll be forced to send you back to therapy.” Gold maintains his stare on the road, but he can feel a shocked Belle staring at him.

They do no speak again, in the car, or the whole of the evening, Belle betrayed, Gold ashamed.

In the night, when he hears her scream, the screams of a child (though one who won’t be a child for much longer), Gold forces himself to lie in bed and listen. After a few minutes, the girl wakes herself up, for he can hear her screams pause and shift, first into pants, as she catches her breathe, and then into crying. It becomes muffled, and he can only assume, that Belle cries into her pillow, to obscure the sound from traveling the twelve steps (as well as one threat, a pair of binoculars, and twenty-eight years) between them.

Cannot know that it’s another dungeon, she dreams, the queen’s, not his, and that just as in the old world, that all she wants, all she cries for, is him to save her from it.


	6. Part 1: On Display

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mr. Gold lets Ava and Nicholas steal from him while they are homeless.

Mr. Gold keeps many things in his shop, almost everything, Belle thinks.

She’s explored the place and the surprises she finds layered on top of layer on top of layer always surprise her. She’s always discovering some new mystery. 

Not just her, other people think so too. Whenever somebody comes into the shop, whatever they’re looking for, whatever they need, Mr. Gold always finds it within the shop (always knows right where it is, too). Books, jewelry, cups, rugs and fabrics, things you plug in, like the lamps and sewing machines. Clothes too. Dresses and heels for girls, suits and ties for boys.

But there’s one thing Mr. Gold’s shop doesn’t ever have: children. 

Children never come to Gold’s shop. She’s the only one (and she’s definitely not for sale—though he has said he might if she doesn’t behave, but Belle thinks that one was just a joke). 

So when the bell rings, and the shop girl looks up from dusting the pipes beneath the glass counters, she’s shocked to see Ava and Nicholas Zimmer. Not so long ago they’d watched her sneak into the mayor’s yard. Not so long ago, Belle would not have been happy to see them, but that’s all in the past. “Hey,” she says brightly, popping up from behind the countertop.

They look wide-eyed, but that’s kind of how the Zimmer kids always look. “Hey,” Ava says. A second later, Nicholas adds quietly, “Hi, Belle.”

Still smiling, dust rag in hand, she hurries around to her two friends. “What are you guys doing here?” she asks, but then excitedly cuts herself off, “Mr. Gold’s shop has the coolest stuff. What are you looking for, maybe I can help?”

The twins exchange a look (Belle always wanted a twin, then she’d have someone to talk with all the time. She doesn’t know what about, her books she guesses) before Ava answers for them both (Belle notes that she’s always doing that, answering for her and her brother), “We just came to look,” as she says the words, the boy turns and begins to do just that, “to say hi to you, too.”

Belle tilts her head, “Really, to see me?” 

“Yeah, of course,” Ava answers, “we’re friends. That’s what friends do, right?”

The question doesn’t sound like a question, and Ava doesn’t look like she doubts her answer, but Belle nods quickly. If Ava was so sure, then she didn’t want to leave any doubt that they were friends. She wanted Ava to know she thought they were friends too. 

The girl smiles, still wide-eyed, looking at all the neat things to look at in the shop, “So, do you think that stupid science test will be hard?”

The tests on Friday, and Belle thinks it won’t be hard at all—it was about the clouds, the different kinds, and who didn’t like clouds?—but the way Ava stares, she answers, “Well, maybe. Did you do the study questions?”

The girl shrugs. “Couldn’t get ‘em all.”

Belle perks up, “I could, you know, help if you’d like.” She pauses and shrugs, like Ava, “I mean, if you wanted, that is.”

The girl nods, “Yeah, thanks.” She pulls the heavy, bright green science book from her bag and they settle on the floor (not dusty, because Belle already swept today). Together they work, Belle explaining the rain cycle (“ _Just think of it like a big circle—like that computer game, where they drive the cars to the stops. Each stop could be a different stage_ …”) and the meanings of the different clouds, what weather they brought. She has no idea how much time has passed when Nicholas says, “Sis, okay, let’s go.”

Ava looks up sharply at her brother, backpack on one shoulder only. She packs her own bag quickly, really quickly. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s late.” After a pause she says, “Mom’ll want us home.”

Belle stands a little unsure at what to do—they moved so fast, neither she nor Mr. Gold ever moved that fast. “Um, okay, but you really have to go?” 

Ava opens her mouth to speak for them both, but both twin’s eyes go wide. 

“Dearie, they’ve got to get home,” the low voice says behind Belle. She turns and maybe Mr. Gold moved faster than she thought, because there he stands, right behind her. He turns to the Zimmer siblings, “Isn’t that right,” he says smiling (or is it his joking smile? Belle can’t tell), “wouldn’t want to be worrying your mother.”

The kids nod, turning to leave in a hurry, but Nicholas says quickly over his shoulder, “Bye, Belle.”

As the bell rings, after the door shuts behind them, she watches them through the window. Suddenly, she wonders why Nicholas’ backpack looks so stuffed and Ava’s so empty. She frowns. 

No. Not her friends. 

“Belle?” 

She shakes her head and turns to her caretaker. “Yeah?”

“I think perhaps we ought to close up a bit early for dinner tonight. Sound good, dearie?” 

She nods, and he limps to the back room to begin checking the locks and shutting off the lights, but she takes her time, looking around at all the cool things in the shop. It takes no time at all for Belle to realize that yes, yeah her friends had. They’d stolen. They’d stolen from Mr. Gold. 

She frowns and clenches her little fist. They hadn’t come to see her at all. 

“Thinking about doing a bit of dusting in the kitchen, are we?” Mr. Gold asks, returning to the front. 

Belle looks down and realizes she still holds the dust rag. She sets it on the counter for tomorrow, wondering what to do. She could tell Mr. Gold, but… 

But Mr. Gold could get angry—she’d not seen it, but somehow she just knew. 

No, she couldn’t tell him, didn’t want her friends (who are still her friends, even if she’s not so sure she’s theirs) to get in trouble, but she wouldn’t let it happen ever again. Not in this shop. Not to Mr. Gold. 

* * *

 

Belle gets her chance a few weeks later.

(The science test had been easy. She’d only missed two.)

When the bell rings signaling the twins return, Belle sets her dust rag down. “Hey, Belle,” Ava says.

She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t say hello. Instead she walks to face them. Quietly she tells the twins, “Shop’s closed.”

The girl frowns, “But the sign says open.”

She shrugs, “Well, it is now.”

Again, Ava answers, a strange look on her face, “Woah, why are you acting so weird—”

“Belle,” Mr. Gold calls out, peeking a head out from the back room. All three children (and it’s still strange for so many children to be in Mr. Gold’s shop. That’s what’s weird) turn to look at him, all three feeling rather caught in the act. “Could you come here for a minute? Need a bit of help.” 

Frowning, she begins, pointing behind her to the siblings, “But they—”

Gold cuts her off, “Now, Belle.”

Feeling helpless (she hated being told what to do, after all), she joins him in the back, where he sets her to work standing on the step ladder, handing down items for him to inventory from the topmost shelves. Definitely not something that needed to be done right now. 

He can feel her frustration. After he passes her back the old oil lamp, he tells her gently, “Something troubling you, dearie?”

She puts her hand on the shelf, trying to figure out the right way to say it. “You left them alone. Alone in your shop.” 

“I’m well aware that it’s my shop, dearie.”

Sighing in frustration she looks down at him on her ladder, “No, you don’t understand. They—”

Gold holds up a hand stopping her. “I know, Belle, I know.”

“You know?” she asks, shocked. 

He gestures for her to step down, offering her a hand to help. “Yes, I do.”

She frowns, “And you knew the first time it happened?”

“Yes, m’dear, I knew then as well.”

“And you just, just let them?” she asks incredulous. 

He nods, “I did indeed.”

“But—but why?”

“I have my reasons, dear,” Mr. Gold sighs, both hands on top of his cane, “but let’s just say, between you and me, I’ve always had a soft spot for children.” 


	7. Part 1: Ivy and Twine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle runs away from home.

It had been an ordinary day at the shop, and Mr. Gold had been just about to lock up for the day, prior to his receiving the call. “Gold,” he answers, automatically, but cringes, when the voice at the other end of the line screeches at him. 

Shaking his head, he tells the woman, his meddlesome neighbor, “You’re going to have to speak at reasonable level, Mrs. Mavis, if you expect me to catch any of your meaning.” He waits, as she explains the problem—though still in her usual, harpy tone. He rolls his eyes at the mundane story, until an off-handed comment catches his interest, “She ran where, you said?”

The woman replies, and Gold doesn’t bother to tell her when he clicks the disconnect button.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Gold, followed closely behind by loyal Dove, walks briskly up to his Victorian bay-and-gable. “You’ll go by way of the library to check the old French place for any sign of her, ” he tells his man, not bothering to turn around when parceling out the order, “I’ll follow close behind, after checking the cabin. I’ve already phoned the sheriff to ensure no one leaves town—“

“There you are!” the angry voice yells from the porch adjacent. “It’s about time you showed up. Your girl almost killed my cat!” 

Gold takes a deep breath and releases it slowly through his nose, trying to keep his temper in check. “Dove,” he begins.

“Sir?”

“Remind Mrs. Mavis what I do to trespassers on my property, if you please.”

“Verbally, sir?”

Gold stops, and the large man behind mimics the action. Rolling his eyes after a moment, he answers, “Yes, unfortunately.” He’d like nothing more than to let the Dove thrash the woman for the trouble she’d caused, but like many things, assault seemed so much worse in a land without magic.

Leaving his lackey to his work, the pawnbroker enters his home to search for any clue as to where his young ward could be. What he finds, confirms his suspicions: Belle’s run away from home.

Her backpack is absent from her room, along with her rain boots, the most practical of shoes she owns, her favorite dress, the blue, gingham one, a wool cardigan of his, and the portrait of her dead family from the parlor, though not the frame.

He finds her mother’s necklace lying upon her dresser, and he recalls telling her it was too fine a thing for reckless adventures, and to dress appropriately the next time she’d decided to run off (hence the wellies).

What does surprise him: he finds only three books missing.

She’d pondered taking more, the discarded choices arranged on her bed, but in the end she’d settled on the Frances Hodgson Burnett collection. A slim box set, decorated on the front with ivy and strands of gold leafing. Twine had been sewn into the spines, giving each their own bookmark.  _A Little Princess_ is her favorite book, for now at least—an obvious choice, it mirrors her own life in many ways, after all—and though  _The Secret Garden_ film had set off a series of her all too frequent nightmares, she loved that book as well. The third,  _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ , she enjoys, but Gold found it a touch too close to home—a cast off young boy, penniless but with virtue befitting nobility, of course, he prefers the other two.

 He scans the other choices, looking for any hint of a destination. She’d considered taking  _The Hobbit_ (she was going on a very big adventure, after all),  _The Little Prince_ , the French copy, though she can only make out a few words yet,  _The Wizard of Oz_ and  _Charlotte’s Web,_ as well as a book of poetry that’s falling apart, though she can’t quite understand it, but knows belonged to her mother. She pulled out Dickens, Irving, Twain and Verne, as well as her George Macdonald and Rudyard Kipling, but having taken his words to heart, she’d erred on the side of practicality and left the heavier tomes behind.

When Gold spots J.M. Barrie’s  _Peter Pan,_ he realizes just exactly where she might have gone, and with a quick look to her nightstand—ah, yes, the outstanding library books are absent as well—he knows where to find Belle.

Just then, his cellular buzzes, “Yes.”

“I found her. She’s—“

Dove begins, but Gold cuts him off, “The clock tower above the library, yes, yes I know. I’ll be there in five.”

* * *

She hears him coming, for he’s breathing heavily by the time he finally reaches the top of the winding staircase. “Clock’s broken,” she says, quietly, looking out past the glass of the clock face, between the hands at five and six, not turning to look at him, her guardian.

“As is the lift,” Gold says, still catching his breath.

At the sentence, Belle turns her head sharply, confused.

It’s very hard to surprise his girl in this life. Maybe it had something to do with what she’d been through, to survive a car crash and lose both parents at such a tender age being no small matter, or perhaps living with a beast is just less surprising the second time around. In either case, his Belle has seen it all, and almost never expresses shock, and so when his words truly catch her off her guard, it’s something of a surprise to him as well. “The elevator, dear,” he explains.

“Oh,” her mouth, her perfect little mouth, gapes open in realization, “I’m sorry. Your knee—I’m so sorry.”

“Quite alright,” he answers, because he’d walk to hell and back for her, so six flights of stairs hardly constitutes an effort.

“You walked?” she asks.

“And lived to tell the tale, never you fear.”

She nods, gently, and returns to staring out into the town square. “Is Mittens alright?” she asks.

Gold doesn’t know the answer for certain, but tells her the truth easily enough, “I’m sure Mrs. Mavis’ cat will make a full recovery.”

“I just wanted to play with him, ‘cause we can’t have animals,” Belle says, quietly, referring to his stringent No Pets rule, and he notes that she clutches her arm, where the thing scratched her, presumably, “and, and then he—but he got me, and I got angry.” She starts to cry, lightly, her arms about her dirty knees (and there are grass stains on her favorite dress. He’d had to be having a word with the dry cleaners). “I kicked him, but I didn’t mean to hurt him.”  She rubs at her eyes, like a tired baby, “I’m sorry, I just get so—so—”

“Angry, yes, I know, Belle.” He truly looks at her then, his broken, angry little girl. She’s twelve and sweet as sunshine and sharp as sunburn. She’s beautiful and perfect and terrible. She’s a child and trapped, (and she still plays with her dollies when she thinks he’s not looking). “So you ran?” he asks, hesitantly.

Belle nods, “Yeah, went to return the books, but then,” she pauses and rubs at her eyes harder with her sleeve. “I got scared, so I came up here. To hide,” She shrugs, “It looked safe.”

Gold sighs. He’s taught her anger and how to be broken, in this life, and now he’s taught her cowardice as well.

He once believed that love was simply providing livelihood, food and a roof over one’s head, but he’s learning that yes, love is an action—layered some would say, and perhaps one of those layers is protection, provisions, and gifts, but that’s not all, love is more than the all that.

Sadly, it’s all he knows to do.

_I want my father back_.

He’s learned a little, perhaps, since Bae. His son had not wanted nicer things, better food or more toys. He’d wanted his father, his wretched, cowardly father, Gold recalls and wonders if perhaps broken isn’t necessarily a synonym for bad, that love, true love, is rarely perfect, and most of the time chipped and broken, but that not making it any less true.

_All you’ll have is an empty heart and a chipped cup_.

He looks at his broken girl and thinks of that chipped cup, and also, of that first house, with it’s leaking roof, and that first spinning wheel with its ruffed up axels. He thinks of a boy who would have rags over riches, and a girl who had lost everything in a single day (and in both live hadn’t even had the chance to say goodbye).

They both made their own choices.

Yes, perhaps, broken isn’t a synonym for bad, perhaps it’s synonymous with harder (but maybe, just maybe sometimes synonymous for better, deeper), and broken or not, he wouldn’t have her learn to be a coward from his old bones, not his Belle. She was always brave, and brave she’d be again. “That’s understandable, dearie,” He’d do everything in his power to teach her bravery (and show her love—he’d learn both along the way. He had to). “It’s just, too bad that you’ve chosen today is all, but,” and he begins to pace, examining the dusty clock tower ceiling, “I’m sure you’ll be quite happy here.”

“Today?” she asks, interest peaked, “Why not today?”

“Hm?” He asks, feigning being preoccupied in his own thoughts, “Nothing, just, I collected the post, on my way over, and it just so happens a package arrived for a girl who lives in the pink house, but sadly, no such girl lives there anymore.”

“What came in the mail for me?”

“Not for you,” he says, pulling the parcel from his suit jacket, “what I have here says its for Miss Isabelle French of the Pink House, and not the Runaway Lost Girl in the Clock Tower.”

She grumbles, “That’s not fair.”

“That’s life,” he says and weighs the book from hand to hand, “it’s a pity too, I’ll admit I myself was a little curious as to what happens to Miss Shirley.”

“ _Anne of Avonlea_ ,” Belle says, eyes bright, realizing the contents of the parcel. “It came.” They’d finished  _Anne of Green Gables_  a week back and every day, she’d checked to see if the sequel had arrived in the mail.

“Indeed it did,” he smirks to her smiling face, but then he watches it fall, slowly, like a leaf, first going this way and then that. “Dearie?”

“I want to go there, to see it.” She tilts her head and sneaks a look out the clock, “Is it nice, Canada?”

 He shrugs, “Haven’t ever been.”

She turns back, wide-eyed at learning of a place that Mr. Gold’s never seen, “Really?”

“Truly.” The idea comes to him and he’s reluctant to share it aloud, “we could go, if you’d like.” He pauses before adding, “it would be new for us both.”

(And who knew what mysteries they’d find. Perhaps his own lost boy had been sent past stars, straight on ‘till morning and ended up sent to some farm in Nova Scotia by mistake, and well, if not, then there were maps to follow to the next great, reckless adventure.)

“I’d like that,” she says softly. “Home?” she asks, standing.

He nods, “Aye, home.” He walks over and winces when he bends to pick up her tiny backpack, his knee reminding him of all those steps.

“I am sorry, about your knee.”

“Yes, well next time you decide to run away, do try to pick someplace with a working elevator.” He shrugs, and of all the things he could have said at that moment (promises of a someday, when he’d spirit her away to Canada, to India, to all the lands and libraries of the world) he chooses: “Who knows, maybe someday Regina’ll  get off her lazy arse and call the repairman.”

His sharp and bright as lemons girl snorts, incredulous, and when he offers his remaining hand to her, she accepts.

They are silent, as they descend the winding stair, but when they emerge into the dying light, Gold tells her, “You mustn’t hide, Belle. No matter what you have to face, running away from it is a far worse fate.”

She eyes him, suspicious, but does not pull her hand from his, “Why’s that?”

He thinks for a moment, “Because if you face it, even if you fail, it’s your decision. Hiding— _running_ —isn’t a choice. It’s not making one at all, and letting life do it for you.” Then, his serious tone drops away a little, and looking down, he says, “Besides, it’s like your favorite book says, princesses don’t run away, do they?”

She shakes her head, “No, I guess not.”

He says no more and hopes the point sticks. As they walk to the car, he pauses, and takes her tiny hand close to his face, noting her dirty fingernails, “Nor I imagine, do princesses have dirt beneath their nails. We’ll have to do something about these, I think. Can’t have you running about like a little ne’er-do-well, can we?”

She sighs, but he knows she’ll change her ways—that’s the kind of girl Belle is, the kind of princess.

With a small nod to Dove, who leaves them to drive home unattended, Gold opens the door for his ward and shuts it behind her. They drive home, where he plans on giving her a stronger imperative to hand-washing and beginning a read-aloud of their new book, and as they go, he thinks that despite the fact the pink house has too much color, and certainly too many stairs, it’s enough to hold two of the same, cut from the same cloth, sewn with the same spool, two broken bits of straw trying learn to be something braver, trying to change for the better.

 

 


	8. Part 1: Same Kind of Remorse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle makes a new Friend. Rumpelstiltskin and Hatter make a deal.

She’s curled up in his armchair, reading one of the encyclopedias. It’s one of the larger volumes,  _M_ perhaps. Gold can’t find it in himself to be upset at her continued theft of his preferred seating. “Belle,” he says her name gently, not wanting to startled her whilst thoroughly entrenched in her reading. 

“Hm?” she mumbles, her child’s lips pressed together, not taking her eyes from the pages.

“Shall I request anything from the library tomorrow morning?” Gold asks, for the next day is Tuesday, their library day, and after the first incident of Belle discovering a library cataloging error, he has made it a habit to call and request any particular books she desires prior to their arrival. It saved on tears and angry, shouting guardians.

His little thing still doesn’t look up, “No, not tomorrow. We can’t go. Scheduled for tea.”

“‘Scheduled for tea’?” he mimics, frowning. “Since when have I needed to schedule a jaunt into my own damn kitchen?”

At that, the soon-to-be thirteen year old looks up. She reaches over and pulls a tissue from the cardboard box on the table beside to mark her place—a little habit of hers he can’t seem to break, no matter how many lovely and varied bookmarks he buys her. Ribbons, cardstock, gold clips, and even one of the magnetic variety; Belle still insists upon using nasal tissues. “Not here, of course. We’ve been invited to tea.”

“Invited?” Gold scrunches his brow, “Who, pray tell, would invite  _us_ to tea?” The only possibility is the Lucas woman and her grandchild—he doesn’t relish the thought, remembering the last time he’d been subjected to the old hag’s hospitalities. Gold sees no reason why play-dates required both parental stand-ins to be present. When he’d said as much to the old woman, he’d received an earful in response, but had largely been untroubled since.

Belle says, “My new friend. I don’t know his name.”

If not Lucas, then who, he wonders. “New friend?”

She nods, “Yes, I made a friend today.”

“Oh did you?”

“Mhm, out in the woods. You know that big, old house? It has the pretty windows I like. I was playing, and a person came out to the porch.”

“What have we talked about with strangers, dearie?” he spits, finding it impossibly hot and stifling in their little living room. He had tried to keep his voice even, but from Belle’s tense expression he can see that he failed.

“I remember. I’m not stupid,” she spits right back. Belle sits back crossing her arms over her chest, angry at her caretaker, “And when he called me over, asking if I wanted tea, I did the right thing.”

“Ran away quickly and called me at the shop?” he says, knowing full well that’s not what took place.

“No, I said I didn’t think tea was a very good idea because he was a stranger, then he invited me inside, and I said I thought that was an even worse idea, without a parent or legal guardian present. That made him laugh, even though I wasn’t joking at all. He said, you’re ‘Gold’s little, broken Belle.’ That made me angry, and then he invited us to tea, and I said yes.” Belle shrugs, as if accepting an invitation to tea from an insulting stranger is the most natural thing in the world. “Should have asked his name.”

“His name is Jefferson,” Mr. Gold says, level and incredibly still, his mouth barely moving to sound out the words.

Belle tilts her head, “Jefferson.” She blinks a few times, “Yeah, that sounds alright for him. He was dressed really weird.”

He wants very much to shout out that it isn’t right  _at all_. Tell her the man’s proper name and the fact that he isn’t to be trusted as far as his little girl could throw him, strange dress or no.

Rumpelstiltskin, after all, has never liked the Hatter—he has no patience for any of Regina’s dogs (not the least when they let their children go. It goes without saying that Rumpelstiltskin has also never been one for mirrors).

What could the man be up to, for this invitation is not simply one father taking an interest in a reminder of his own lost child. There are ulterior motives, of course—there are  _always_ ulterior motives, as he knows best of all. With a sigh, Mr. Gold asks, “What time tomorrow?”

“Four thirty,” she says, book already opened back up once again, already engrossed once again.

“Fine. We’ll go,” he answers, under his breath, but she doesn’t even register the reply. “What are you reading about, Belle?” Gold asks, wondering what has her so enthralled.

“Hm? Oh, I’m reading about the Minotaur.”

Ah, so it is the  _M_ volume. Mr. Gold turns to leave, plan for their tea and do a bit of filing before dinner, but Belle continues, “I think Ariadne should have fought the monster. She was way smarter than stupid Theseus.”

“All that wisdom, and she still became as foolish as the rest when in love,” he answers, unable to stop the honest words, for he knows this myth cycle.   

Belle nods, “Think she was happy with Dionysus?” She says the third vowel of the name with a hard  _E_ sound.

“It’s Dion- _Igh_ -sus, dear,” Gold corrects, “and I don’t know. Certainly better off than most children in Greek tragedies at any rate.” He watches his little Belle stand and replace the volume on the bookshelf. She returns with the slimmer  _H_ volume, looking up Hippolytus, he presumes, which will only confirm his point, that children rarely fair better, wrongfully carrying the weight of all their parents mistakes and faults to tragic, violent ends.

* * *

They arrive at exactly five till four thirty. He allows Belle to rush forward to ring the doorbell, as she so loves to do, but upon hearing the sound echo inside, he puts a heavy hand on her shoulder, pulling her to his side.

The door opens, revealing the pathetic excuse for a magician. He smiles at the misfit pair, like a snake. “Well, well, I see someone’s learned punctuality, after all these years.”

The older man rolls his eyes at the overdressed upstart; they both know by heart the song and dance of confidence and theatricality—but they also know that Rumpelstiltskin knows it best out of the two. “The one with the upper hand always arrives on time, everyone else is either early or late.” Out the corner of his eye, he sees Belle look up at him, confusion written on her heart-shaped face, but he doesn’t look down, instead staring straight into the eyes of this mad man he understands all too well.

After a brief but tense pause, Jefferson laughs, leaning against the doorframe, purple neck scarf gracefully hiding his scarred neck. “You’re just as I remember. Such a comfort to see that some things never change, don’t you agree?”

“Yes, including that whenever I’m  _called upon_ , I’m rarely offered a seat,” Gold quips.

“Oh, how clumsy of me.” He looks to both the pawnbroker and his ward, “Apologies, do come inside.” He steps back and with an outstretched hand nudges the door open for the pair.

Belle moves to walk inside, but Gold holds fast to her shoulder. “It seems to be my turn to apologize,” he says, matching the Hatter one false cordiality for another, “but the weather being what it is, I think it for the best if we proceed out of doors. I’m sure this large estate of yours must have an outdoor venue of some sort that would suffice.”

For just a moment, the Hatter’s smile falters, but just as quick, it returns, lopsided as any of his top hats. “Of course, the air outside is rather fresh, and you do have your charge’s health to think of, after all,” he says, joining them on the porch. Jefferson leads them around the back, where the porch widens into a rounded veranda. He gestures to the wicker patio set, “Is this to your satisfaction, Mr. Gold?”

“Quite.”

“Terrific. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be along shortly with our tea.”

Of course he will, Gold thinks. Once alone, he whispers to Belle who has taken a seat in one of the over-large chairs (the white furniture piece looks to be veritably eating her alive, and he doesn’t like the sight, not one little bit), “Don’t drink or eat anything he gives you.”

“But why—“

Gold cuts her off, extending a hand, as Jefferson returns with a silver tray. As he begins to arrange the place settings and little plates of food Gold knows to be delivered on weekly basis from the local Storybrooke grocer, he looks up to his older guest, blinking at the still-standing man, “Please, have a seat.”

Mr. Gold thinks for a moment, as Belle and Jefferson stare at him. There are perhaps, two to three others with whom he would feel even less comfortable leaving his Belle alone, but he’s warned her and she’s smart, and this may be his only chance to have a look about. “I fear the drive over was rather long. Might I trespass on your hospitality to use the facilities.”

Hatter sniggers, sharp as fabric scissor, “Trespass to your heart’s content.” He points into the large house, “Through the sitting room, down the hall, third door on the left.”

Gold gives him a gregarious smirk, and turning inside, a last warning look to Belle. He leaves her alone with a man known for abandoning minors. It’s the worst thing he’s done in four years, since agreeing to that loan for Moe French.

He limps down the hall, taking in the antiquated telephone on a side table, a few trinkets here and there, including a basket of fresh, untouched apples, that could have only come from Regina, as well as a locked room, vaguely smelling of mercury and old, decaying brocade, but that could be his imagination. When he’s exhausted even the most illogical allowance of time to relieve ones self (even one his age) he returns to the veranda where he finds his worst nightmare realized.

Belle lies, slumped over the arm of her chair, a teacup spilled and fallen to her left.  His sight goes red as flame and he spits out, “If she’s hurt, you’re dead.”

Jefferson laughs, and leaning back in the white, wicker chair, he puts his hands behinds his head. “No permanent harm done, and this way we can talk without little ears.” He gestures to the chair on Belle’s left, across from his own, “Isn’t that for the best,  _Rumpelstiltskin_?”

Grumbling, he walks over briskly. Business-like, he rolls Belle’s head back and up, placing two fingers to her pulse point on her neck. True to the man’s words, her heart beats at a normal rate. “Thought I’d taught her not to accept tea from suspect strangers.”

“Oh, you did.” The younger, eccentrically dressed man points to the little girl’s full cup at her own place setting. “She drank yours. Lord knows why.”

Gold freezes, halfway to sitting. After a moment of his thoughts playing catch-up, he lowers himself and rests his cane against the table, “What are you playing at, boy?”

Jefferson smiles, pouring his own tea, with generous measures of all additives: milk, lemon and sugar. Rumpelstiltskin thinks of another who poured tea and made sport with his Belle—he holds no love for either such tea-drinker. “I simply thought it high time we stopped ignoring each other.” He stirs his tea and takes a leisurely drink, “Regina isn’t going to neglect you forever, you know.”

“True, but that’s not why invited us, Hatter; what do you want?”

“Want? Now that’s a question,” he chuckles to himself, tapping the spoon on the over-sized teacup loudly. “I want so much. I want so many things.”  He tosses down the silverware, painting light brown splashes on the white tablecloth. “I want to  _throttle_ Regina, I want to  _leave_ , I want to go  _home_.” His words and eyes are wild, and Rumpelstiltskin remembers the sound from his own voice the night he lost Bae. Then, Jefferson sits back, tucking away the madness, “But that’s all neither here nor there.” He points to Belle, undisturbed from the outburst, “Have you tried to teach her?”

Mr. Gold scoffs, “Why bother here?”

Jefferson shakes his head, “You don’t know, do you?”

The imp rolls his eyes. “Is there a point to any of this, because I’m a busy man, things to do, people to see,” he says. He takes particular glee in adding, “places to go.”

The Hatter leans forward, throwing his hands to the table top; silver rattles, “I’m dead serious. We both share an enemy. Haven’t you figured that out already?”

“For one to be an enemy, boy, one must be a matched opponent. Haven’t  _you_ learned  _that_?”

“Fool,  _she_ did this,” Jefferson pleads, pointing to the sleeping child—the child who is brave and beautiful and still so very  _Belle_ , but who should have been full-grown. “Regina did that to screw with you.”

“You think I don’t know that,” Rumpelstiltskin bites back, and it’s true. He knows the Miller’s daughter’s daughter better than the haberdasher. “You think I don’t know  _her majesty_ better than you ever will. You’re the fool.” He laughs then, “You who would leave your child, believe a word out that lying mouth.”

At the mention of his child, Jefferson looks feral, eyes darting to the silverware. Gold is glad to see only teaspoons and butter knives between them. He presses at the open wound what with innocuous weapons at the madman’s disposal, and of course, Gold has his revolver in his pocket should Jefferson turn truly violent, “Ooh, hit a nerve, did I?”

However, the Hatter closes his eyes (not simultaneously, one before the other), and his mouth moves, counting slowly, in an attempt to bottle the anger, bottle the insanity, for another time. When he opens them again he says, “Then you must know that your little Belle’s something special.”

“Of course she is.”

Jefferson scoffs, “Not like that. Special to the curse. Special to magic. She ages—I’ve seen it.”

Mr. Gold looks over at the preteen, who was once a child, who was once a babe in this land without magic. “I don’t appreciate your watching her.”

“I watch everything. What else am I supposed to do?”

“Certainly made enough hats, I’m guessing.” Because the man is clearly on his last leg of sanity, Rumpelstiltskin pushes no further. He asks, sighing, “This all appertains to me how?”

Jefferson’s mouth twitches, along with the three deep wrinkles in his brow, “I want to teach her.”

“Teach her?” Mr. Gold’s eyebrows shoot up into his hairline.

“Yes, teach her a little arts and crafts. You said so yourself, she’s something special, who knows, maybe even precious.” The Hatter opens his hands in mock nonchalance, but beneath there’s a depth to his desire, to his request, that is not lost to the dealmaker. “Let me teach her. I think she might be able to reach something we both want, with the right guidance, of course.”

Rumpelstiltskin thrums, a-twitter with the electricity of the idea—his Belle being able to touch magic in this amiraculous land—but Mr. Gold answers, “I don’t think so, boy.” The idea is out of the question, but he’d be lying if he said the possibility hadn’t crossed his mind. After all, this is something he cannot teach her. He studied this particular art of realm jumping, but never mastered it, the power simply one not in his cards, so to speak.

“Did she have the touch, in the old world?”

“She could have.”

Jefferson frowns, “Could have? What’s that supposed to mean?”

He sighs, “It means that she did not pursue that particular avenue.” It means that he did not teach her, but that he could sense the untrimmed sprouts of magic in, about and around her, like a garden lot left untended, wild in its beauty, but without proper direction. He should have taught her. He should have guided those sprouts, perhaps then she’d have had some sort of defense against the wolves he’d left her to when he’d sent her away from his castle and dungeon.

He should have, and that’s why he says, “Perhaps she may return.”

“You’re going to let me teach her?” Jefferson asks, gleeful and childlike.

“Not so fast,” he amends, frowning at the pup’s over-eagerness. “If this is to occur, it’ll be on my terms. She may return, but only out of doors,” Mr. Gold says, “Belle’s not to step foot inside the house.”

“Outside, but that,” he looks around, trying to process the implications, “that means no winters.”

“Indeed.”

“That’s ludicrous.”

“No, that’s one of my terms,” Gold replies, evenly.

“There’re more?”

He smiles, “But of course. Our mutual acquaintance,  _enemy_ as you say, is not to hear a word of this. You understand me, Hatter?”

“You don’t have to worry about that. Regina and I don’t exactly get along,” he nods.

“A common occurrence among her friends.” Mr. Gold looks over to the still-sleeping Belle, “She’s not to know the truth. You’ll not mention magic, not even a whisper.” He turns back to the frowning man, “I need your word on that.”

Jefferson clenches his jaw, “How can I teach her if I can’t tell her the truth?”

“Oh, you’re a smart enough man. You’ll figure it out.” He grins, all meaningless intent, “Do we have a deal, Hatter?”

The younger man drums his fingers on the table, “Fine, it’s a deal, Rumpelstiltskin.”

“And your word, no speaking to her of magic?”

He presses a hand over his perfectly, pressed pocket square, “My word,” He crosses an _X_ over his heart in derision, “Hope to die.”

“Don’t we all,” Gold says. “It’s getting late. We should go.” For today, remains unsaid, and the lawyer hates the very idea, but can’t help but wonder at the future of this verbal contract he’s just made.

The leaving proves difficult, for Belle cannot be roused in so short a time. Much to his chagrin, he is forced to allow the Hatter to carry his girl to the car. Leading the way, Gold only leaves them long enough to pull his Cadillac up, parking it adjacent to the front steps. Going as far out his fine prison as he can, Jefferson stands on the last step and places Belle safely into the passenger seat.

The older man bristles as he watches him strap his ward into the seat. “You backstab me, Hatter, and I’ll make you pay in the worst kind of way.”

Jefferson shuts the car door with an unnecessary amount of force, “Don’t bring her into this.”

“I wasn’t the first to bring a child into this adult’s battle,” he says, pointing his cane at Belle. “No child should pay for the sins of their father, but alas,” Gold shrugs, “such tragedies can, at times, be unavoidable.”

The Hatter is upon him in a second, face to face, “Are you threatening my daughter, Imp?”

“Threatening, who said anything about threatening?” He pokes his cane into the offending chest, pushing him back a step, “I’m just making a simple observation.”

“Well, I could do without your observations, sir, if it’s all the same to you.”

“It’s not,” Gold clips. “Let me offer a final word of advice: watch yourself closely, boy, I’d not wish the loss of a child on anyone, particularly when precipitated by actions of the parent. I’d not wish that kind of remorse on anyone.” He steps forward, where Jefferson took a step back, “So, again, don’t break this deal, Hatter. You’ll regret it.” Mr. Gold steps around him leisurely, before stepping into the driver’s seat he says, “Oh, congratulations on your new apprentice.” He drives off, leaving a restless and stranded (and broken) father watching them leave, in the rearview mirror.

* * *

Belle awakens just before they enter Storybrooke proper. She sits up, rubbing her eyes, lazily, “What happened?” she asks, her words only slurred a touch, though whether from drug or sleep, Gold cannot tell.

“You fell asleep, dearie.”

“Oh,” she says and proceeds to curl up again, on the center console, resting her head on his right forearm. “How long till we get home?” Belle asks, with a yawn.

“Not much farther, dear,” he lies, because truly they have so very, very far yet to travel, but he cannot tell her that, at least not today.

The next morning, when she’s fully awake and lucid, he explains the rules. If she’s to visit her new friend, she must never, ever go inside Jefferson’s house. What’s more, she must always tell Mr. Gold beforehand when she is visiting, and she is never to drink or eat anything of the other man’s.

Belle is clearly confused by the rules, but doesn’t question her guardian, and he knows with such a strong warning, she’ll obey him. He knows she trusts him that much, to put faith in his words without explanation. He wonders if she should, if her choice is the wise one.

Gold takes note shortly thereafter, only a few months and two visits to the larger estate after, that his Belle makes another new friend.

She befriends a girl a grade or two below her own. The girl’s name is Paige, and it also does not miss his notice that when Belle matriculates the next year and her new friend does not, that the friendship does not dissipate. 

  

 


	9. Part 1: Fourth Best or Third Worst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle’s first hat-making lesson with Jefferson.

“ _Ow, shite_!

At the odd curse, the man across the patio table laughs, throwing his—thankfully bare—head back.

“What?” she asks. The word is muffled by the fact that she sucks on her pin-pricked index finger.

“Oh nothing at all, it’s only you’ve got quite the mouth on you, Jingle Belle,” Jefferson scoffs. “I wasn’t expecting that.” It’s the second time that he’s been alone with the little child, Gold’s ward, and the first since the three of them had partaken in quite the eventful tea party. He strides over, plucking up the hat on which she’d been laboring. Licking forefinger and thumb, he wipes at the drop of Belle’s blood staining the top rim.

“What are you doing?”

“Assembling a town muster.” He doesn’t look up. “What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m cleaning your mess.”

“Shouldn’t you use soap?”

Jefferson smirks, “No. Spit’s the only thing that can take out blood.”

“Really?”

“Really really.”

The little girl shrugs. “I don’t know much about cleaning clothes. We do dry cleaning.”

“Technically, the Wangs do dry cleaning. You’re just the runner-rabbit, Jingle.”

Belle looks up to glare at him, “Why do you keep calling me that.”

“Because it’s accurate. Because you’re never quiet enough to escape detection at entrance,” he passes the hat back to her, “escape notice,  _observation_. It’s not a good thing, but makes for easy moniker-making.”

“Is that how you saw me, in the woods? I was too loud?”

Walking away from her, the young man leans against the patio railing. “You could say that, Jingle.” He turns back, to find her tongue sticking out on one side, forgotten in her concentration on sewing. “You could also say I’m just observant.”

“There,” she says, tying a knot and snipping off the thread ends with a child-sized pair of fabric scissors. “I think I’m done.

Skipping over with a dancing and light step (and it warms him, even though it’s early October—with many, many more Octobers to go—and she’s not his daughter, and he’s still locked in a glorified insane asylum), he plucks the top hat out of her hands again and appraises her work, turning the top hat this way and that. It’s just a normal hat, for Jefferson plans to teach her technique first, only to add in the secret ingredient once she’s skill enough not to be distracted by the means and patterns and pins, once she’s skill enough to hear the call of the portal’s identity, sculpt and shave away the unnecessary tidbits.

The hat is just a hat, but it’s a start. “Not bad.” He tugs at the lopsided (though, he knows this to be on purpose) bow. “Nice touch.”

Belle takes back the hat, trying it on in the little vanity mirror, pulling it closer from the center of the patio table. She examines herself and what she could be in the mirror—for even here, the mirror has a way of foretelling, the lightest bit of magic, but Jefferson, nor any who see this little, ringing waif, need a mirror or magic to tell them that she’ll be a beauty one day. “I practice my bows with ties. It’s the same slick stuff, so I’m used to it,” she comments lightly, posing and watching her own reflection.

Jefferson smiles with half his mouth (all he, and the town, and all the queen’s men can muster on his face) and tugs at the bow again. It holds steady and does not come undone at his prodding—she’s some potential yet, truly. “It’s called  _satin_ , the shiny fabric.”

“Satin,” she repeats, nodding to herself. She takes off the hat and sets it on the mirror, hiding its glass face. Belle leans back, taking her teacup with her; she does not drink from it this time, he notes. “Why can’t I go inside?”

“Because I’m hoping to live past this next winter,” he mocks, taking up his own cup.

She snickers, and after a startled second, Jefferson joins in. The little bluebell, little bluejay still in a nest not her own, knows humor her senior, and it’s refreshing to joke and be heard by ears other than his own. “Come on, tell me,” Belle whines, leaning forward.

Setting his cup on the table, Jefferson leans in close to answer, hands on his knees, “Because in my house, there are sharper things than needles and pins. Mr. Gold knows this. He doesn’t want to take any chances with you, because you’re something special, maybe even precious.”

Belle frowns, raising only her left eyebrow (another trait beyond her age; Gold is more a teacher than Hatter, apparently, for little Jingle knows language and laughter and expression. Before he can stop his mind, Jefferson thinks what a nice visitor she’ll make). After a lengthy pause, Belle smiles, saying, “You’re weird.”

“Yes, yes I am.” Standing, he bounces the top hat off the free-standing mirror, high enough that he can position himself beneath it, have it land almost square on his head, only tastefully askew an inch (maybe even two) off center. It’s an easy enough trick, not worth the gleeful sound the child he hosts makes in response; Hatter’s always been good at positioning himself beneath the true action, have it land atop him (only twice did the landslide swallow him whole, the first time, taking a bite he’ll never get back and second, one he works for now and always will).

“Would you show me something?”

The question pulls him from the outer gardened edges of the hedge maze in his head. Jefferson takes his time answering, composing himself as he reenters the world, this world without  _visible_ magic (magic without trimmings, but plenty of trappings, much more subtle and nuanced than in the old world—it would be artful in its refinement if it wasn’t so damn infuriating), tugging the hat down around his head, tighter. He also notes that she does not say ‘could.’ It’s just another thing, Hatter’s sure the imp has taught her, drilled into the soundboard, scolded out the flat note from his belled, wind chime child. “Depends on what ‘something’ you’d like to see.”

“I want to learn how to tie a bow behind my back.” Belle reaches her tiny, seamstress hands behind herself. “I got a book on bows and knots and stuff, but I can’t figure it out. Oh, and it has to be a square bow.”

This intrigues the haberdasher. “Why do you want to learn something like that?”

“I want to get ready all by myself. I don’t like having to wait for help.”

“Mr. Gold not so good at lady’s fashions, I presume?” Jefferson teases.

Belle doesn’t laugh. “I’m going to start making breakfast,” she explains slowly, in a teaching, almost admonishing voice, that sounds vaguely like one belonging to a crabby old dealmaker and antiquities collector turned dealmaker and antiquities collector. “ _So_ I have to get up before him.  _So_ I have to get ready all by myself.  _So_ I have to tie my own bow.

Jefferson smirks. She’s cute. She’s trouble. He decides that he likes her (though not enough to go out of his way for her when it won’t bring profit to himself—he doesn’t like anyone that much). “Sure, Jingle, I can teach you that.”

After going inside and returning with a mannequin that he lowers to match the little girl’s own height, he shows her how to first tie a square bow, then to tie one behind her own back. As he watches Belle practice, watching the small of her own back in the mirror-face on the table, as she stands on his wicker chair (the edges of course, lest she break it and fall down, down, down, right through the center), Jefferson thinks this may very well be either the fourth best or third worst decision he’s ever made—but he’s absolutely certain its certainly nowhere in between those two extremes.


	10. Part 1: Harsh Realities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle’s survival lessons.

With the addition of the Hatter to their lives, it’s as if another clock had started turning, and true enough, Rumpelstiltskin realizes that the queen will not ignore their happiness inside the pink house forever. He knows he must prepare his Belle for what’s to come, though it means crossing a bridge from the safety and innocence of their tiny, molded life into a dark and evil world full of queens and black carriages, curses and wishing wells gone dry.

This time, he’s the one to approach her, late one evening on their balcony.

Like a little faerie queen in her bower, his child sits, curled in a wicker chair, reading some fantasy or other. Her hands are clean, but her bare feet are dirty, hair flying from a day of running about with her new friend, the wolf-girl, followed by a sewing lesson with the realm-jumper. Her dress, decked in two satin ribbons on her shoulders is untidy and rumpled, the skirt bunched too near her waist to be proper for a soon-to-be adolescent girl; there are many bridges to be crossed these days, it would seem.

He sighs quietly in the doorway, watching her read in the fading light, thinks of the picture posed almost identically that sits behind his pocket square, never having moved since the day he’d learned of her existence. Gold walks out, but Belle does not hear him and his limp. He tugs on the ribbon at her shoulder as he passes—does not stop behind her to read over her shoulder as he often does, this evening with her skirt so high and so many changes to be faced—going directly to his own wicker chair. He sits with a groan, putting most the weight in his cane; he’s too old for this. “Pull your skirt down, dearie,” he instructs, perfunctory.

Belle looks up, blinking, but does as he bids. The look in her eye doesn’t connect the movement to necessary modesty, just another lesson from her mysterious guardian. After the adjusting the garment, she doesn’t speak, and though she’s always been quieter in this world, something in her air gives him pause. Since the nightmares, since the afternoon following her waking to him still in her bed, there’s been a shift, a wall’s sprung up between them, a wall largely of Rumpelstitlskin’s own making, and though their actions have changed very little, only in miniscule detail, he feels it, knows she does as well, and the chill in the pink house does little for his old bones and her young, wild nature.

He hates to push her away, hates to bid without explanation, but things must be as they are, lest he not push, lest he not bid, lest he instead pull her close and never let her go, and Belle has enough problems without adding that to the growing list.

He stares at her, his little Belle, home safe from the wolf in red and the mansion in the woods, and knows that things cannot go on as they are, he knows she cannot continue to travel so unprepared (she might as well carry a basket instead of a backpack, a hunter green cloak instead of a plaid school jumper). She needed to know how to fight, how to survive, and she needed to know now. “School’s out, it would seem.”

Belle looks over at him frowning; her guard never having been one for inane, obligatory small-talk, “Yup.”

“That’ll be giving you a lot more free time, I think.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I believe a change is in order.” Belle tilts her head in confusion. “Last summer is not to be repeated,” he clarifies; he  _bluffs_. “You twiddled your thumbs with much too much time on your hands—we need to find a more productive use for your time this year.”

“I read last summer.” Belle frowns, “Is this because of Ruby? Because Ruby’s grandma told her she wouldn’t spend another summer on the couch watching TV? I don’t even watch TV.”

“No, no, dear, nothing like that,” Gold chuckles, proud of his little bookworm. “I had something a bit more active in mind.” She shuts the book, and he notes that she reads a collection of Doyle’s  _Sherlock Holmes_ stories—not surprising, his Belle always having held a love for mysteries. “Tell me, dear, can you swim?”

* * *

They start small, with the lessons in survival.

He finds the flyer for the swimming lessons on the bulletin board outside the town hall easily enough. He calls the number and schedules a weekly time, but when they drive down to the wharf, what they find surprises both pawnbroker and child.

“You brought her a suit, didn’t you,” the scratchy voice asks, and sniveling, wipes his nose on his windbreaker sleeve. “Can’t teach her in that, whatever it is she’s wearing.” Stunned Gold holds up the sports bag he’s brought. “Hm,” the janitor, Leroy, frowns, “Okay then. She can change in the boat.”

The fowl-dispositioned dwarf turns out to be a skilled swim instructor, to both parties’ shock. The man teaches her fast and thoroughly, often yelling and cajoling, nothing like Gold’s quieter tactics (and more than once the guardian has to bite his tongue to keep from yelling at Leroy).

Early in the swimming lessons, when one day, Belle stops swimming halfway back to the dock more from frustration and stubbornness than exhaustion or lack of skill—in no true danger for she wears floats around her upper arms, being a beginner, after all—Leroy begins in on a particularly briny tirade, stating he’ll throw her back out farther, to start all over again if she keeps up her put-on tears.

The little girl looks up at the silent Gold standing on the dock in accusation right before swimming to shore as she’s been told. He feels the look like a blow to the chest, cringing on the sidelines, watching her fine form and technique.

On the car ride home, the wall between them stands tall, and Gold fearful as ever, decides try to scale it. Belle sits silently with her arms crossed over her chest, not quite fuming but pouting rather. “You’re wondering why I did not reprimand him,” she looks up, surprised at his forthrightness, and he recognizes her expression: it’s the betrayal she’s worn since he’s denied her comfort for her night terrors, and he realizes all at once that he’s done it a second time: break the trust of a child and not work to set it right, instead hoping it will mend all on its own. But that’s not how children work—that’s not how trust works. “Why I let him be so  _harsh_ with you?”

Belle’s façade of anger—or perhaps, he realizes, her shield—cracks and he watches tears well up in her blue eyes. She nods, croaking, “Yeah.”

“Because,” Gold beings, but realizes he can’t possibly concentrate on both her and the road. He pulls to the side of the road without warning, the little girl looking about, shocked at the jarring park job. “Because, Belle, this is a matter of life and death. I won’t have you not knowing how to swim, even if it means that—that bastard yelling at you. If that’s what it takes to get you swimming, then yeah, I’ll let him do whatever it takes, no matter the methods—can you understand that? Does that make any sense?”

Belle nods, blinking at his unusual loss of composure, his intensity and hot emotion. “You’re just trying to protect me?” she whispers.

“I am.”  Gold nods, once fierce. “I’ll always protect you, Belle.”

“Okay,” the child tells him, and wiping away her tears, she puts on a brave face, “I’ll try not to cry next time.”

He sighs, almost a scoff, “You can cry, dearie, if it helps, just swim while you do it.” He pulls out, looking behind his shoulder, back onto the road into town.

Belle shakes her head, “You—you don’t like it, I think—when I cry. Your face gets all scrunched.”

Gold’s foot slips off the accelerator, but he finds his footing again quickly enough—so the pain he feels at her pain, any pain of hers at all, shows beneath his mask.

He’d have to work harder at his mask, in that case.

After a moment, he pats her wet head, hair curling from the stuffy, summer air, “Don’t trouble yourself over me, dearie. I’m not worth it.”

* * *

The swim lesson continue unfettered, Belle learning to swim greater distances, as well as jump into the water and return to the ladder without any hesitation or difficulty, as well as without the help of any flotation devices. It all seems to be going well until, after much improvement, at the end of class one afternoon, Leroy climbs the ladder first and then reaches a hand down to help Belle, “Here, sister, let me help ya’out.”

Belle takes the man’s hand trusting, as Gold notes the difference in the man’s tone, the intent all too clear, “ _No, don’t_ —“

Leroy lifts the child’s negligible weight effortlessly and tosses her back, far out into the bay, the splash cutting off the older man’s yell.

Belle bobs up out of the water, sputtering and coughing.

“What are you gonna do?” Leroy yells at her, flailing in the water. “What have you learned?” She continues to bob and splash, startled by the surprise throw. “Well swim! You get tossed in, you trip horsin’ around, some little shit knocks you in: what are you gonna do? You gotta swim back!”

“Help,” Belle spits out, still refusing to do what she’s learned in her lessons, instead reverting back to natural instinct of fear.

“Oh, don’t give me that shit! You know what to do!” the janitor hollers at the child, “S _wim goddamnit_!”

Gold opens his mouth, fed up and unable to stand back any longer. He steps forward, about to take the plunge in after Belle himself, when his girl ducks her head back into the water and  _swims_.

She reaches the ladder after a handful of strokes, even going so far as to turn her head to take in a breath of air. She reaches the ladder and clutches at it, shoulders shaking. Leroy bends down, putting a hand to her shoulder, “There, you see,” he says gently to the shaken child. “I knew you could do it.” She looks up at him, eyes wide. “You just had to show yourself that you could do it. Right?” Belle takes a moment, but then nods, wiping her eyes. “Come on then, climb out.”

Leroy has her jump in and swim back twice more before he finally lets her go home for the day. While she changes out of her wet suit, Gold pounces. “If you ever so much as—“ he begins but changes course, growling and pushing his cane into the janitor’s chest, “You crazy, ignorant son of a bitch. She could have drowned!” 

He bats away the cane, “No, she couldn’t have.” Leroy says, nonchalantly. “Look, Gold, you’re a smart guy. When you came to me what did you say? You said she had to learn to swim, bottom line.” He shrugs his shoulders, “Part of that is her learning that if someone pushes her, if someone’s out to get her, surprises her,  _whatever_ , she has what it takes to get to safety. That’s what we did today, and anyway if things had of gotten really serious, I would’a jumped in and got her.” He shakes his head at Gold’s over-protective streak, “You saw her: kid was fine.”

Belle continues to go back to lessons for the rest of the summer, the dwarf teaching her water safety and survival techniques: how to swim in a full suit of clothes, how to float with an injury, how to swim away from an attacker (“ _You swim down, sister—who’d want follow you that way_?”), and how to escape a headlock in the water, among other practical skills.

They then move on to driving the boat. She learns to operate the bulky, ancient thing, with next to no turning radius, and at the end she’s learned enough that she has the knowledge to pass the boating license exam, but she’d have to wait a few years to sit the examination formally.

Gold watches as the dwarf and his Belle click easily, the tension from the swimming lessons melting away into a quiet respect and curious enchantment. He sits back far enough during the boating lessons to give them privacy, but close enough to hear their comfortable chatter. Leroy asks the odd orphan questions, and she answers wisely and thoughtfully, without hesitation, only pausing to decide upon an answer, if taken by surprise.

She charms him of course, the moral, though ill-tempered imp always having a soft spot for sweet-smiled, free spirited dreamers—be them princesses, orphans, or even, heaven forbid, fairies. 

Gold can see she enjoys the interactions and reminds himself that not everyone is his particular brand of hermit, and though he knows her to dislike large groups, he takes pride in how she appears to be thriving in one-on-one exchanges, cultivating her conversation and critical-thinking skills.

* * *

In addition to lessons at the wharf, on Saturday mornings—which she begrudges with an intensity, frowning and grumbling the entirety of their drives to the elementary school gymnasium—he hires the Golden Knight to teach her self-defense.

The man, not particularly known for his intellect, instead for his bravery and loyalty, makes a more than acceptable physical education teacher. Jim teaches Belle to dodge and roll, to block and hold. He teaches her the best way for a youth, as well as a woman, to fight off an attacker, as well as the best places for nails and knees, the soft underbellies for her to exploit.

Gold watches closely, determined for Belle to not be unprepared when the queen’s hammer falls.

She excels at nuance, of course, at the unexpected side step, and suddenly the weight of her opponent, the body of the attacker himself betrays him, becoming a hindrance, and Belle in the meantime has crossed half the gymnasium. From the floor, Jim laughs heartily, and sits up, looking at the pawnbroker. “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about this one getting caught in dark parking lots, Mr. Gold—she’s a fighter, this one.”

These bouts end in bruises, sweating and sore muscles, but each only works as a reminder that she’s a step or jab closer to autonomy and self-protection, that it’s no defenseless maiden he keeps atop his dragon’s hoard.

Afterward, they take breakfast at the diner, and every other weekend or so, stop back at the pink house to gather up supplies and packed bags for the last of her survival lessons, which he must teach her on his own.

It feels like a lie, a trick (of the sweetest variety) to take her to this haven, this sanctuary, to train and shore her up against the harsh realities of this world into which he’s cursed them, but he knows of no better solution; he takes her to the cabin.

“Where are we going,” she asks, as they drive that first time.

He’s not even given her time to shower and change clothes, having been able to shake a particularly determined Sidney Glass, and not wanting him to know the whereabouts of his safehouse. “Some place secret.”

The cabin stands small and quaint, not ostentatious in the least, in contrast to the pink house of Regina’s construction. “Go on then,” he tells her as they stand on the front porch. “Let’s not waste the whole of the day.”

Belle tries the handle, but finds it won’t budge. “It’s locked.”

“Aye, but let’s not have that stop you.” He opens his jacket and pulls out his lock picking set. “Your first lesson: even if a door’s shut, there’s always another way—you just have to be smart enough to find it.”

He sets to teaching her to pick locks, but she does not get the cabin door on the first or the second time. However, it’s a start, and what’s more he’d planned on her initial failure. Finally, he relents and opens it himself.

Once inside, he realizes that the cabin is to the pink house what the spinner is to the Dark One: the cabin is entirely of Rumpelstiltskin’s design, not gilded, and subtle in its refinements—watching Belle’s eyes flit around the living room, taking in the few, necessary and telling items, he realizes the honesty with which the cabin portrays its owner, more a reflection of himself than he’d realized.

Here at least, the wall slides down. 

She looks up knowingly, and she’s too smart, read too many books, lived too many lives; she knows there’s more at play than simply a weekend vacation. “Why’d you bring me here?

“Because, dearie, there are things you need to know that I can only teach you in the woods.” He hands her a stack of books, that medium always being the easiest with which to communicate with her. She looks at the titles on survival in the wilderness:  _Swiss Family Robinson_ ,  _Island of the Blue Dolphins_ ,  _My Side of the Mountain_ ,  _Robinson Crusoe_ ,  _The Call of the Wild_ , and the last, two more adult-themed novels,  _Lord of the Flies_ and  _The Blue Lagoon_.

“You can start on those tomorrow, but read this first, a little old, yet, but you’ll grow into it,” he hands her a copy of Emerson’s essay,  _Self-Reliance_. “I think it of high importance for one to be able to provide for oneself, not only in an urban, or perhaps  _suburban_ is the more appropriate term for our situation, but also in a rural setting, the wilderness, if you will.”

Belle takes a moment thinking, before she smirks, “And you’re the teacher this time?” she asks, connecting the dots between this and her other summer activities.

“Quite,” he mirrors her expression, sharing in this, their private little quip. “I’ll be teaching you the rest.” He knows well-enough, centuries not detracting from his decades as a simple man, a man of the land.

In the weeks to follow he teaches her how to pick locks, truly, starting with interior doors and simple locks, working their way up to exterior, dead bolts, and even the car door. During the daytime, he teaches her tracking, the various footprints to be found in the forest and how to cover her own tracks, if need be.

They make a game of it. He gets an allotment of time (usually longer, for she loses track of the hour, absorbed into a book in the main room of the cabin that serves as the kitchen, living, and dining room), and if she can find him, she chooses their out-loud reading for the evening. If she can’t then he picks—always dry and appropriately dull to drive the point home—she still likes his voice all the same and always learns something from the material.

He teaches her how to use pocket and butterfly knives, how to start and tend a fire with matches, flint, as well as without. He shows her how to catch and collect, or boil if need be, clean water, how to find nests and climb the trees for eggs (though the climbing he need not teach her, he does make her do it both barefoot and with shoes).

He shows her plants, how to identify those edible in nature, makes her memorize their various uses, as well as the toxic and their more sinister purposes: poison. She makes no comment at the dark lesson, and he offers no explanation.

He teaches her knots and net making, and she needs his nimble, spinner’s fingers to show and reshow, over and over the quick work of the knots he crafts. It takes his old mind too long to force himself to slow down for her sake. “You go too fast, I can’t—I can’t see  _how_.”

He sighs, frustrated with himself, at centuries of practice made perhaps too perfect, “I’m—I’m sorry, it’s habit, dearie, and I’m an old dog, after all.”

“Please,” she asks, “just, a little slower.” He nods and tries again, and finally, they find a speed at which compromise can be reached, neither too fast as to miss her eyes nor too slow as to trip up his fingers.

He teaches her the square and Fisherman’s knots, the double and the figure-eight. He teaches numerous Loops, Hitches, and Cloves, the Bowline, Bachman, and Prusik, as well as the Rappel for a harnesses and the Chain Sinnet for extension lines. Last, he makes her learn the Kleinheist and Guarde for moving loads larger than the loader—useful, for even at her oldest, he knows her to only be a wee thing.

Gold teaches her to build, as well as detect, traps, on the pretense of catching animals, a simple and more benign method of hunting, but when he comments on the weight allowance of one of her traps, Belle realizes he’s taught her how to catch a human prey should the need present itself. Her response causes him to falter: “Way better than brownies.”

“What’s that now?”

“Brownies, you know, like the girl version of boy scouts, but way more lame.”

“Still not following, dear.”

She shrugs, pulling a knot taught around the railing of the porch one afternoon, late enough that they can spot a firefly or two. “Boy scouts learn all the cool things, knots and fires and camping. Stupid brownies don’t do that. They’re supposed to be the same, but they’re not. Ruby does them.”

“ _It_ , dearie. ‘Ruby does  _it_ ’,” he corrects her. “And perhaps you’d do better not judge so quickly. Say, the person in charge chooses the curriculum. Thought of that?”

She shrugs, “Maybe.”

Later in the week, Gold looks into the organization wondering if perhaps he could have outsourced these lessons as well, but finds true enough, the curriculum of both the Boy and Girl Scouts to be severely lacking for what he wants his Belle to learn, filled with fluff and non-essentials—not to mention, he can’t fathom letting go their weekend adventures together.

Soon, they move on from knot-making and hide-and-seek games to more serious topics. He teaches her first aid, how to dress a wound, clean it and make stitches if necessary, how to deal with a burn, and avoid frostbite, how to identify and deal with overheating and hypothermia. She learns to butcher and cook an animal. She does not like it, but neither is she soft, this incarnation of Belle. She’s harder, in this world. She knows of death and she can do it, with the knowledge that there’s a reason to this madness, these lessons on life.

On days his knee pains him, Gold uses the opportunity to teach her to fish, taking two chairs out to the small pond behind the cabin. Belle learns to make her own pole and lures, and they sit in amicable silence for hours waiting for a bite. He teaches her how to gut, bone and fry her catches, as well as take them off the hook without getting finned—an effort that takes an entire afternoon, not for mistakes made, but for crying. Belle’s never been on to like anything slimy or in the last amphibious or reptilian. Finally, he loses his temper and yells at her that if she waits any longer she’ll kill the catch, calling her a coward.

Belle, in turn, grabs the barely wriggling creature, nigh on dead, pulls out the hook, shuddering at the feel of ripping flesh, and tosses it back into the water with an angry over-handed throw. “There! Happy?” she yells back.

Gold gasps, eyebrows up to his hairline. He sputters out, “Certainly not unhappy.”

When she falls from a tree, he speeds her to the emergency room where they learn she’s broken her right arm, though luckily only a minor break; they cast it all the same. After, she learns to do everything left-handed, as well as how to set a bone and make a stint with the available supplies.

He also makes her climb the same tree—he won’t have her living in fear of a memory. It takes all day, but in the end she uses her knots and her one arm and two legs (and bright, brilliant mind), and climbs up and back down successfully.

On quiet days, he teaches her how to use a compass and how to determine her directions, as well as how to travel by the stars and constellations. Belle memorizes them by their mythical namesakes, Greek tragedy after Greek tragedy the pair speaks the tales of the damned gods and humans under their thumbs; she loves them all and learns to navigate at night quickly.

They are casual here at the cabin. He sheds his usual three pieces in exchange for an oxford rolled to the elbows and a pair of old khakis to allow for movement. She wears whatever her muse demands as she scampers through the forest, soon moving as if she’d been born and raised within its confines, as if she were the huntsman’s pack sister—but with steel in her veins and a depth to her philosophies unknown to the queen’s pet.

One evening he sits, whittling, as she point out the stars to him as they appear in the dusk sky. “Cepheus,” she says, pointing to the seated king, low in the late summer sky.

Gold blinks up, briefly, his hands pausing at their carving, though he hardly need check her identification. “Very good,” he mumbles, pipe in his mouth, “and in the fall?”

She moves her right index finger upward and over—she’s finally out of the cast, but still favors the limb. He looks up again and nods at her correct identification of the star’s soon-to-be movement, “Aye, correct.”

Belle looks over today at him. Today, she wears a pale blue dress, with a pair or over-large wellies. “What’re you making?”

He looks down, setting the pipe on the porch railing. Gold had hardly registered the movements of his hands, but what he finds stuns him. He’s created a paper-thin, long and flat handle, adorned at the top with a wheel and spokes.

He’s made a bookmark in the shape of a spinning wheel.

He gapes at his creation, not hearing the rubbery, thumping steps of his ward. She leans over his shoulder to stare at the item. “Wow,” she breathes.

Dumbfounded, Gold passes her the tiny, whittled piece, “For you, I think.”

Belle runs her hands over the wheel, “Looks like flag of India.”

The curse provides him with the image, the green and orange national symbol, complete with the twenty-four spoked Ashoka Chakra—the circular ring an icon of the agrarian people and unending rule of law.

“It’s a spinning wheel,” he explains, and she looks at him confused. Clearing his throat he says, “Fetch me paper and pen, child.” She slips out of her shoes at the door and rushes back with a pad of paper and pen. He accepts them with shaking hands, but sketches his old trade tool, easily enough. “It’s what they used to make thread.” Passing her the drawing, he adds, “There’s usually one out at Miner’s Day; I’ll show you sometime.”

Belle nods looking between the paper and the woodcarving—the bookmark. “This looks like the thing from Sleeping Beauty,” she says, referring to the fairy tale that’s hardly a tale at all.

He chuckles thinking of that particular deal—and the dragon in the library basement. “ _Exactly_ like Sleeping Beauty.” Gold gently takes it back from her tiny hands, “I’ll stain and seal it, then you can hide it in a drawer and decidedly  _not_ use it as a placeholder in your many, many books,” he teases.

Belle rolls her eyes, “Whatever.”

“You know I’m right, dearest; you use more tissues as bookmarks than both of use for their proper purpose combined.”

She gives his shoulder a gently shove. “Wouldn’t need so many bookmarks if someone wasn’t always interrupting.”

He chuckles at her and smiles, unguarded and open—all walls down. Then of course, the wind picks up, he remembers her to only be in the light cotton dress, feet bare without her galoshes. “Time to be headed inside, I think. Will you start the fire, or shall I?”

“I can.”

“Belle,” he sighs, “I know you  _can_ —“

“— _can_ , but  _will_ you. Yeah, yeah, I know.” She cuts him off, finishing his sentence, “I  _can_ , and I  _will_.” She says before flitting inside, leaving him with her bookmark and her stars (in awe but very much without his heart).

* * *

As the summer comes to an end, he usually lets her drive the final stretch of dirt road to the cabin, sitting on an outdated (but still exceptionally accurate) phone book. She’s tentative and hesitant and altogether too slow, but every once in a while, after an easy stretch, he can see the gleam in her eye and knows that she’s intrigued by this coming adventure as any.

Lastly, he teaches her to shoot his pistol. She’s too young to properly deal with the recoil and needs his help—would need it for some years to come. Gold hates himself for how much he enjoys helping her to hold the firearm steady, but all the same, when she finally hits her target, he smiles genuinely.

When they leave the cabin on their final weekend before school starts up again, both knowing they’d not be out nearly so often, he attaches a miniature can of mace to her keychain along with the key to the cabin and the car (in this lifetime there’s no place he keeps from her, no locked doors or secret wings he’s forbidden).

Belle eyes it curiously. “Hm,” She says.

“You’ll have to be a bit more specific than ‘hm’ dear.” He says, unsure of himself and the gesture of trust, wishing she’d simply make her thoughts known. He’s the Dark One, not a mind reader, after all.

“Is this supposed to make me feel safe?” she asks. “Was that what this whole summer was about?”

“Perhaps,” he says cryptically, “do you feel safe, Belle?”

“I guess, but then,” she starts, but stops, retreating into her own head, thoughtful. “I guess it’s like what Mr. Leroy did. I can learn everything, but I need to know that if I need to, you know, take care of myself, do any of this when I’m surprised, when I  _don’t_ feel safe, I need to know that I can.” She pauses, tucking the keychain into her dress pocket, “So I guess it’s not about feeling safe at all.”

Gold blinks at the accurate assessment, “And can you do that, Belle, do any and all of this if taken unawares, afraid and surprised?”

She does not answer right away, instead a wrinkle in her brow, truly measuring her answer, “Yes,” Belle nods, once and then again, “yes, I think I can.”

The guardian smiles, “Good, because that, my dear, is really what this summer was all about.” Gold turns, locking up the cabin, and they drive back to the pink house, both more than a little sad to leave the cabin haven and return to the real world once again.


	11. Part 1: Prelude to the End of Indian Summer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first day of school, Belle makes breakfast. She falls; Gold catches her.

It’s too hot for hot breakfast, Belle knows this, but she makes it anyway, scrambled eggs, toast, and a little bit of sausage—only breakfast foods she can make, but she’ll learn others soon enough. She can do anything as long as she tries, but this morning they’d have to make do with hot breakfast, even though it’s been about a million degrees outside, way too hot to be morning and definitely way too hot to be the first day of school. She’s never gotten up to make breakfast before, but it’s a new year, and she’s been thinking about doing it for a while now. So today, the first day, seems as good a day as any.

Belle knows the minute he arrives, and not just because she heard his cane on the stairs. She knows he’s watching; she doesn’t turn around.

In fact, she expressly refuses to acknowledge him, because most the time she hardly knows what to do around him and today she wants to at least look like she knows what she’s doing. So though Belle knows she needs the step stool to get out the nice plates, for luck (it  _is_ the first day of school, after all), she simply hops up onto the countertop. She doesn’t worry about scuffs, since she’s in her school socks.  

“Dearie, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

Belle turns around, smiling; she knows he calls everyone, even boys, dearie, but she likes the nickname all the same. “No ‘good morning, how’d you sleep? Good luck with your first day’ before you start lecturing me?”

Gold smirks and limps a little closer, already completely ready in his usual, suit. He wears a dark one, like always, even though the weather’s boiling. “Hardly a lecture, barely even an admonition.” His face goes stern, “Though I am serious, best let me get whatever it is you’re after.”

She giggles and shakes her head, “You worry too much.” She turns back around, reaching up for white and blue patterned plate.

“Now, Miss French, be reasonable—“

Of course, he’d be difficult. Why she ever thought he’d be nice and pleased by the fact that she woke up extra early to make them breakfast, Belle had no idea. “Honestly, Mr. Gold,” she begins formally; see how he liked it. “I’m not—“

She doesn’t get to finish, because too much of a turn and suddenly she’s slipping, with a half-scream, half-squeal, falling backwards without anything to grab, but then, just as suddenly, she’s safe, in his arms.

He drops her immediately, with a pained gasp, and she has to grab him, scrambling for balance, slipping on the tiling in her socks. She blinks up at him. “How’d you?” Belle asks, looking down at herself and sneaking a glance at his injured leg.

“You’re scarcely ninety pounds when soaking wet, dearie. Not exactly a heavy burden to bear, even for a cripple,” he says in a harsh tone, and she realizes she’s still touching him.

Belle drops her arms, saying, “Don’t call yourself that.”

Gold scoffs, “It’s a simple matter of fact and reality, my dear. Can’t very well change what I am.”

Belle sighs, “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

“You’d rather I let you throw yourself to your death?”

“No, not that—you know what I mean,” she says, turning to the stovetop. She fiddles with the eggs, before turning off the burner entirely.

“No, I don’t. You’re going to have to be a bit more specific for this old codger.”

 “ _That_ ,” she says, pointing at him. “You always talk about yourself like that. Why do you have to do that?”

Gold waves a hand, helplessly, “Because, m’dear, it’s true.”

She shakes her head, bending to pick up his cane, where it rolled beneath the table. “Well, I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Careful there,” he says, taking the item, but leaning back against the countertop, looking far more capable than he gave himself credit for. “I’ve been told wishing rarely ends well for all parties involved.”

“That’s probably because they were doing it wrong, asking for something selfish or against the rules.” She turns to get the step stool, fetch the plates properly this time, but he anticipates her.

“Allow me.” Gold easily plucks down two fine china dishes, leaning a bit too heavily on his cane, and Belle feels bad for having caused him more pain than usual. He passes her the first plate, but as she takes it, Gold does not relinquish his hold. “Good morning. How’d you sleep? Good luck with your first day.”

She smiles. “Thank you,” she replies, half teasing and entirely genuine. She turns away to serve them the too-warm meal. “And for not letting me fall.”

“It was no matter, Belle,” he says, and she wonders, just briefly, why he sounds so sad.

Later that morning, when she walks to the school, meeting Ruby half way, and the girl asks if anything happened over summer, Belle shakes her head, says nothing really (certainly not cabins, and constellations, and being caught mid-fall). Her friend then proceeds to ask if nothing happened, why was she blushing, but Belle waves her off, chalking up the red in her cheeks to the summer heat, already close to unbearable in the morning sun.

* * *

He knew she’d fall—he knew it like he knew the lengths the princess and shepherd would go to for True Love, like he knew Regina would eventually ask for a child, like he knew where she was the day she ran away after nearly killing the next door woman’s cat.

Like he knew he loved her.

He knew, and he let it happen.

He’s lucky she’s not a year or two older, for he doubts his knee would have been agreeable to supporting her weight otherwise. However he caught her (but only just), and of course, she proceeded to read him easier and quicker than all her books combined, breaking down his walls one look, lecture and pointed finger at a time, in her tartan skirt and knee high socks, looking for all the world an innocent thing, rather than the brilliant, mischievous, wicked sprite he knew her to be.

He’ll only disappoint her in the end, so instead of the truth he tells her the most minimal of what’s in his heart, because he’s weak, and his Belle’s always been so good at exploiting that detail. She’d be the death of him (or worse, he to her), nearly was as his knee reminds him for the rest of the day.

It’s sweltering, so Gold stays inside, passing the time in his cool and dark shop, wondering how she fairs at school. He thinks about driving past, but puts files that bit of ridiculous away instantly.

Instead, he makes a few calls, orders his hired muscle, the Dove, to terrorize the dry-cleaners for losing another of his pocket squares, checks on the progress of a pregnant woman in about to be transferred to prison from a juvenile detention hall in the southwestern United States, phones the nuns to schedule the yearly check-up visit, the women of the cloth standing in for the proper social services (it’s a comfort when he’s told it’ll be Sister Astrid to make the evaluation this year, for Belle loves the woman and would be pleased to see her again, much as she’d try to hide the fact, never wanting to admit to excitement over any reminder of her short stay at the damp monastery), and wonders if Regina would notice him procuring a spinning wheel, for he needs something to take his mind off of a be-stocking-ed ne’re-do-well.

After he runs out of busy work, he ends up doing inventory (again), which then leads down the slippery slope of digging through the old chest where he’s hidden what’s left of Belle’s things from the old world.  He finds nothing appropriate to gift her—what says, I love you, I’ve always loved you, forgive me, stay forever?—so instead he settles on bringing home a taller step stool for the kitchen.

Best to avert any future falling damsel incidents altogether.

Belle’s already home when he enters the pink house. She listens to the record player in the living room, tucked up on the couch, working on homework. He peers in through the doorway silently. She’s chosen a Rachmaninoff recording of Chopin’s waltzes and preludes. It’s a worn album, but the scratches do not detract from the sad melodies.

“What’s that?”

Gold blinks up at her, surprised to find her staring at him and the ladder. He moves it forward so she can see it properly, “For the kitchen.” With half a smile he adds, “so as to spare my remaining leg.” She snorts unladylike, and looks very much the adolescent. “Something funny, dearie?” he jokes.

She forces her face to appear serious, and only partially succeeds, “Well I guess that’s good, since you’ve only got the one.”

He chuckles, “True enough.” Yes, and it’s hers if she wants it. Gold turns to leave, but stops, asking hesitantly, “School went well?”

Belle nods, “Yup.”

“Same, uh, same class as your friend?”

The query brings a true smile to her face, “Yeah, Ruby and I even get to be science partner this year, because we can choose our own.”

“Hm,” he says, “you’ll share some of your work habits with Lucas and not the other way around, I presume?”

She rolls her eyes, “Oh my gosh, Ruby’s not  _that_  bad.”

“ _Belle_ ,” he answers, in the low, parental tone.

“Oh-kay, yes, you know I’ll be good.”

“Thank you,” he answers, and she smiles again before turning back to her books. “Belle?” he asks, causing her to look up once more, “maths in an hour or so?”

She goes a little red in the face, nodding, and surely it must be the music. Chopin did that to anyone, particularly the faster pieces. Yes, the music. That must be it. “Tea too?”

“As you wish,” he tells her before trudging up to his study. Once upstairs, he does not shut the door, instead, letting the piano drift to him. He knows there to be no definitive title for the composition (she’d asked him once), but thinks the assumed “ _Quelles larmes au fond du_ _cloître humide?”_  fits the bill more than sufficiently. He sits at his desk, listening to Prelude, Op. 28, No. 4 in E minor, and cliché as it is mourns their tragic tale, which spans three decades, two floors, and far too many falls.

What tears are shed, indeed?

All the same an hour passes with no work done. Gold stands and returns downstairs to boil water for their tea. He then beckons her, teaches her decimals (she’s not very good, but listens well enough), and lets his thoughts drift while she works over a word problem.

Belle looks up, distracted. She’s shite at the word problems, despite her love of literature, and can’t seem to keep her focus. “Think it’ll stay hot?”

“What’s that, now?” he asks, pulled from the dark corners of his mind, darker than the cell in which the charming lovers had locked him worlds ago.

“Summer? Is it going to keep being so hot, or is fall going to get here?”

“I don’t know,” Gold tells her, “but they call this Indian Summer—the ones that never seem to end—when there’s hardly an autumn to speak of before winter arrives,” he teaches her (he always seemed to be teaching her. Perhaps that’s why he always felt so stupid: he’d given her all his hard-earned wisdom and left none for himself).

“Do you think it’ll be that way this year?”

“I’ve no idea, dearie,” he says, helplessly. “None at all.”

Belle nods, not disappointed, rather resigned to his lack of a proper answer. “I wish it was fall already.”

“What have I told you about wishes?” he says, jovial, but at her lack of laughter, he asks, “Why’s that, dear?”

She shrugs, “Uniform’s too hot, and I like fall.” She takes a sip of her tea—she’d stolen the chipped cup out from under him, as she was prone to doing. “Ready to have a fire.”

He chuckles at the little pyromaniac. “Worry you not, it’ll be here soon enough, I’m sure.” He speaks honestly, because if she’s already been bargained for, already tried to run away, if she’s already fallen and he’s already caught her, then he knows what comes next (and he simply isn’t read for that again, not ready to throw her into any dungeons, to stand firm before her accusations, to stand stock still when she leaves him, and most of all, not ready to be left alone with only a chipped cup for company once again, but they’ve done this before, and he knows what comes next, whether he wishes it or not). “Perhaps, too soon even.”


	12. Part 1: Season of Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gold and belle procure Henry.

It’s still too warm when Regina calls, but the leaves have begun to turn, “Gold.”

She’s in one of her moods; he can hear it in her voice. He sighs, audibly, “Madam Mayor, to what—“

“Don’t play stupid,” Regina snaps, “You know why I’m calling you.”

Gold rolls his eyes. She’d never been one for subtlety, even in her earliest, kindest days, “The deal.”

“ _Yes_ , the deal!” She sneers, “the hell is taking you so long?” He’s made her wait years, made her wait on Emma Swan to get knocked up.

Three to be exact.

He smiles at that—she’d never thought what it would be like, living one year over and over again (and the people of this land even had films about such unbearable immortality—he rather sympathized with the journalist who tried to kill himself to no avail by way of toaster and bathtub). He shakes his head at his brash, biting, and above all thoughtless little student, “These things take time, Madam Mayor.”

“Look, Gold,” the woman emphasizes his name, and he recalls just exactly when she’d started saying it differently, when she’d gone from the easy-going pronunciation to a more nuanced, insinuative tone. Sometimes he almost misses her simplicity (but isn’t watching her work herself into a tizzy so much more fun?), “You know what happens to those who cross me.”

There she went again, all elbows and knobby knees, never mind it that the curse ought more than inform her that as a supposedly elected official there’s sound equipment attached to her phone. Such technicalities were lost on his little Regina once she set herself on the warpath, sight gone all red and blurred.

“You don’t need to remind me about deal-breaking, dearie—need I remind _you_ that I’m a lawyer?”

“Look: I’m serious.” She slows down a bit, telling him, “you’ve done very well, here in Storybrooke, Mr. Gold. You wouldn’t want all that hard work going to waste, now would you?”

Gold chuckles, low, the way he knows infuriates her most, “Are you threatenin’me, Regina?” his accent breaks into the sentence, because the idea’s funny to him in the deepest of ways, to the core—he loves to toy with her here, whilst she, the beautiful little fool that she is, believes him cursed and ignorant—but turns serious, “because if’in you were, who knows what I might be forced to do, in fear of my safety, what kind of sensitive documents I’d release to the papers, secret deals I’d start mentioning…”

“You wouldn’t,” she breathes.

“Not without just cause.” He lets the last sink in before continuing, “don’t rush me. In fact, I’d been meaning to call to tell you I’ve found one.”

There’s an audible gaps on the other end of the line, “You have?”

“Yes—one whose absence from the system will be little noticed, nor missed.” He goes on to tell the woman to expect further communiqué from him, and soon, but when he hangs up, Gold’s head drops and he lets out a quiet groan. The timing of it all—he’s cutting it close, very.

However, one didn’t plan curses (and the subsequent breaking thereof) for three hundred years and counting without gaining a handle on timing.

“What are you doing?”

He almost jumps from the voice at his back. Gold turns, and there stands Belle in the doorway to the back of his shop. The record player still sings in the background, but she’s heard him on the phone, despite. Belle stares at him, and the eyes are light, but still it’s a child and a condemnation. Still it hurts.

“Hunting children,” he growls.

“For her,” she adds, “You’re getting  _her_ a baby.”

There’s no lies to be told, it would seem. Frowning, he admits, “Yes, I am.”

A little wrinkle appears between her eyebrows, “Why her?” 

There’s accusation in her tone, and Gold can’t help but scoff, the defense slipping out before he can stop it, “Because she paid me, dearie, and that’s how the world works.”

It gives Belle pause, to hear him speak so coarse and direct. “You’re bringing it to her?”

“Yeah,” he turns back to his large computer, a new addition to his shop, with little more than a word processor, a whirring engine and dial-up internet services—he plans on moving the obtrusive thing to the back, for it’s no business disrupting the messy equilibrium of the front room—and types a little into an open email document, the recipient a warden in Phoenix with whom he’s some rapport. It always takes him longer than he’d like, this newfangled technology. “If I can manage it,” he mumbles. 

“I’m coming with you.”

Gold blinks, turning round again, “I—“ Startled by the statement, he pauses, but then wonders why not allow her to accompany him, why not allow Belle to meet this baby, this other evasion of their unmemorable, salted land. He nods, “Alright, dearie.”

Belle nods (though she doesn’t smile) and leaves, the curtain fluttering in her wake. He stares at her absence; she’s flabbergasted him. He stands in awe, as usual—but then, as suddenly as she’d left, she returns, the step stool from the back of the shop on her arm. She drops it beside him without ceremony, and mounts it, leaning her elbows on the countertop, chin in her hands.

Gold stares down at her inarguably, pudgy child’s hands, but her fingernails are clean and there’s a youthful muscle definition to be seen about her shoulder blades, a little curve to her upper arms, from tree climbing, he presumes. It’s evident, in the little playsuit she’s changed into after the school’s let out, this disconnect of baby fat patches and sinewy limbs that speaks of coming changes, a babe on the cusp of weaning…

“Okay, so what do we gotta do?”

The man shakes his head, awakening (always, always awakening, and perhaps his curse stuck a little too strong—stronger than he’d meant). “Surprisingly little,” he chuckles. He clicks on the closest approximation to magic in this world, sending his missive, miles away in a matter of seconds. “Less than we ought and measurably deserve,” he twists the heavy words, but in a lighter tone, explains, “the trick,” he tells her, smirking, “is to make others do it for you.”

Belle looks up, the wrinkle reappearing, “ _Oh—kay_.” She holds out both syllables, and Gold realizes that soon, yes, very soon, she’ll be a teenager, and  _oh, the gods help him_.

“Manipulations we call it.”

“I think,” she says, taking her time, for she’s coming to the age where she’ll shirk off child’s honesty (how he misses it already), moving to measure her words, “You’re good at that.”

It’s teasing. She’s teasing him, Gold realizes. “Indeed.” He teases back, “Could even call it my specialty.”

She giggles, and he smiles down at her, unguarded for a moment. She turns to the screen, “Do we have to go get the baby?”

“Not quite.”

Without asking, Belle takes hold the mouse and begins to click around, the little sound of her finger against plastic fast and jarring. She nods, as he watches her, surprised at her dexterity and ease with the computer, “Somebody’ll bring the baby here?”

“Indeed, to the town line. All we must do is pick up and deliver the thing.”

Belle gives him another nod, and there’s a touch of finality to it. “Good,” she says, and he wonders if she feels it too, the curse edging their border, warning them that bad things await all those who try to leave, to escape.

But then, despite not leaving, something bad is happening, is it not? The bringing of a child, a child for Regina to love as much as she can, only to eventually lose. To love, to wreck, and eventually to lose.

Something bad, indeed.

* * *

Two weeks later, he calls Regina, “I do hope the room’s ready.”

“You did it?”

“On the threshold, yes.”

“I didn’t—“ she clears her throat, he hears, and changes direction, “Yes, the room’s prepared. When will you make the delivery?”

“We’ll come in the night,” he tells her, and remembers her mother, Cora, for just a short moment, “Tonight, after midnight.”

* * *

 

It’s closer to morning than not when he gently shakes Belle’s shoulder, “Belle, sweetheart.”

She does not awaken easily, and he considers letting her sleep, when she rolls over, rubbing her eyes, “Huh?”

“It’s time, dearie.”

“The baby?” she asks, still sounding half asleep.

“Aye, the baby.”

She nods, and pushes herself from bed. 

He leaves her to get changed, expects that he’ll have to yell up at her to hurry, that time’s of the essence in this delicate matter, but just as he finishes his coffee, setting the mug into the sink, she appears in the kitchen doorway.

She holds a fluffy blanket, taken from the hall closet. When Gold stares, confused, she tells him, “I thought—you know—for the baby?”

The forethought jars him, but all the same he tells her, “Quite, very wise, dearie.”

Quietly they slip from the pink house in his Cadillac, and head to the border.

* * *

The savior’s son sleeps peacefully, whether lulled by car or Belle, Gold knows not. He wonders however—for it’s not the first that his little caretakers handled an ill-gotten child from his dealings. She holds the thing quite comfortably, after his initial instruction at cradling the head. Is it memory that makes her look like a natural?

Or is it just Belle?

The drive to the Mill house passes quickly, with little suckling sounds, as the child works away at a pacifier, Belle coos at it, every so often (and Gold does his best to keep his damned eyes on the road). He parks, and can see that the lights in the entryway are on, despite the early hour. He’s sure they’ve been on all night.

Gold clasps his hands, setting his wrists to rest on the steering wheel, and without truly knowing how to begin (despite having had this very conversation many, many a-time, worlds ago), he starts, “Now, Belle—“

“I know.” She looks at him—and shouldn’t her child’s arms be tired by now—brave as the day he met her, “The baby’s  _hers_.”

She never wanted to give them up, but she always did. He stares at her, and does not smile when he says, more shocked than she, “You’re growing up.”

That causes her to frown, but he doesn’t stand for it, instead exiting the vehicle, and moving to her side, he opens the door for her and the child. After removing the infant car seat the boy had been delivered in from the trunk, together, they walk up to the front door, but before they get even half way up the path, the door opens, revealing Regina.

Gold takes her in, and for an instant, he remembers holding her, both in her infancy, and that one night, of her adolescence, when she’d still been an innocent, not yet set on the path of destruction and power. She looks young—younger than his girl, even, and in that moment, he feels remorse.

(Remorse like a knife.)

Then, the boy cries, and Rumpelstitlskin remembers Baelfire. With the car seat he gently nudges Belle, and they walk forward.

Vulnerability pours off Regina as she shifts from foot to foot, but once close enough to hear a harsh whispers, she picks a stance, and with arms over her chest, she spits, “I began to think you weren’t coming.”

Gold steps up onto the porch, and after setting the car seat down, he puts a hand to Belle’s shoulder, holding her steady, as well as just outside Regina’s grasp, “Oh now, dearie, no need for presumption.”

“What’s  _she_ doing here?”

The older man chuckles, “Can’t expect me to do all the heavy lifting, what with the cane  _and_ the car seat, I’m liable to drop him.”

She opens her mouth to answer, but his words stop her, “Him? It’s a him—a boy?”

Gold nods, “Yes.”

Regina too, nods, when the bundle gurgles, her attention snaps to him. She swallows with visible trouble, “That’s him?”

“Indeed.”

Slowly, she reaches out her arms, and both she and Belle look to Gold, asking permission. Pushing away the niggling feeling, he drops his head once in ascent. Belle hands over the baby boy to Regina, and though the evil queen gives her one icy glare for an instant, her full attention hones in on the freckled child in her arms.

For all her bumbling, she always did have an intensity of focus (Rumpelstiltskin’d counted on it, many a time, in fact)—he can’t help but admire it, in this instance.

“What’s his name?” Belle asks, quietly.

Gold’s head snaps to her—and it’s the phrasing of the sentence that takes him unawares, she’s twisted her words  _just so_ , as if she knows (and hell, perhaps she does) that there’s an importance, a weight, to this moment.

Regina doesn’t even look away from him, just keeps rocking him, and there’s love in her eyes, plain as day (she’d always been a dreadful liar, after all). “Henry, his name’s Henry.”

That’s all it takes to remind Gold. As the wind picks up, he says, “We’ll leave you to get acquainted with your son.” He turns, his hand still to Belle’s shoulder, and as they walk down the path, he feels it, that twinge that hits him from time to time (but has been occurring with an unsettling frequency of late), of being not convalesced in an endless cycle, but of being in the present—the instantly ending moment—to feel time move, the earth turn. When it happens, it feels like the curse stretching it’s muscles, readjusting amidst a sound sleep (not unlikened to a dragon upon a particularly fine hoard), tightening for a moment and then relaxing, returning to dreaming.

He feels it, that moment, shivering from the sudden cool breeze that’s picked up, and then it’s over.

Once safe inside the car, he runs a hand through his hair, tussled from the blustery weather—it’s long, his hair, but at a length not quite ready for a cut, and yet never grew, for of course Regina would pick the most inconvenient of lengths to condemn upon him for nigh on three decades. He looks over, and too, Belle shakes, rubbing at her arms. He grabs the blanket from the backseat and gestures for her to wrap it about herself.

As they drive home, he turns up the heat, but still, it takes some time for the car to warm. “Winter’s arrived, it would seem,” Gold observes, but when his girl does not answer, he asks, “Are you alright?”

She shakes her head yes, but stays silent, hunched and bundled.

“You did well,” he tells her, “no easy task, that.”

Belle’s silent, and he thinks that she’s more shaken than he’d first imagined, or perhaps simply tired, but finally, she speaks up, “I didn’t like it, but she looked so happy—is that—“

She drops off, and he chances a glance at her bewildered face, “What is it, dear?”

Her head moves side to side slowly, like she’s lost. She continues to search for her words, and it’s that pause of thought again, that transition from youthful honesty to aged reticence, “I don’t know.”

He laughs low and sad.

“What?” she asks frowning, her pride more than a little bruised at his laughter.

The sight’s just another chilling reminder; he shrugs, “You’re just growing up, is all.”

 

 


	13. Part 2: Of Instincts, Maternal and Chivalrous

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gold commissions Kathryn Nolan to mentor Belle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part 2 | in vain, with endearment (13-18)

She’s in her last year of middle school, when snow comes early that year—for though their world revolves on a circular plane, resetting itself from time to time, their little forest landed in bloody, coastal Maine, of all places, and the weather’s completely unpredictable.

The school releases the children early, for safety’s sake, and Gold closes the pawnshop early to pick her up in the Cadillac (best not to take any chances in the face of a curse that appears dead set on hurting his little girl—quite literally). The vehicle, however ostentatious, however much a statement by Regina that he’s a comfortable life, but still entirely too ancient to properly enjoy it, handles impeccably well through inclement weather.

When he drives up to the front of the school, a touch later than the other parents, the dismissal rush having dissipated for the mid-morning, he thinks little of Belle’s downturned head and stomping steps. For the first, It’s cold, which he knows her to dislike, and for the second, there’s an individuality that comes with being singled out as one of the few students needing after-school care, when waiting on her legal guardian to pick her up at his leisure, which he knows her to dislike most of all (but he’s responsibilities, even in this cyclical, shadow realm, and some things must be as they are. Doesn’t change the fact that Belle thinks his lack of punctuality stems from lack of concern, which could not be farther from the truth).

So, he takes her poor posture and expression for granted, however, he does think it amiss, when he spots Mary Margaret Blanchard—the princess Snow White—chasing after her, only one arm in her coat, struggling to put on the garment fully, as she shuffles to the vehicle. As Belle slips into the passenger seat, she too spots the puerile teacher and scowls. As she clips on her seatbelt, she asks impatient, “What are you waiting for?”

“Something you’d rather me not know, apparently,” he answers, with a wry smile. “What’s all this about, I wonder?” he asks, rolling down the window for the tiny woman, hardly dressed for the first snow of the year, in her little pastel skirt and matched ballet slippers. The woman’s coat, on closer inspection, appears to be a man’s, in the school colors, with the insignia on the lapel. Gold wonders if the gym teacher loaned it to the ill-prepared princess—the Golden knight always did have a nihilistic penchant for the chivalrous.

“Hi, I’m glad I caught you,” Miss Blanchard says, bright as springtime, bending down to address him inside the warm car. Wrapping her arms about herself, she looks unperturbed by the quickly accumulating flurries, which doesn’t surprise Gold—she was named for the stuff, after all. “Sorry to keep you,” she apologizes, also with a smile.

In this world, the curse made the woman border on the insipid. He can’t say he much approves of the change, could hardly stomach her sweet and not completely predictable moral code in the old world, but this curse-manufactured confectionary nature with all its emphasis on her purity and her weaknesses, is just as irksome, and twice as unhelpful. “Ms. Blanchard,” he greets cordially enough, “What seems to be the problem?”

“Oh well,” she begins, and the woman gains just a touch of the mortification his little ward wears. “You see—“

Gold frowns, noting how his charge keeps her eyes pinned to the dashboard. “Not growing any younger, dearie,” he prompts, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.

The woman frowns at him, eyebrows making a most unbecoming jagged line on her brow—he finds the show of backbone surprisingly refreshing. It’s no archery, robbery, or assassination attempt, but it’s a start. “You don’t have any relatives in town, do you, Mr. Gold,” she asks, huffing impatiently. “Female relatives?”

“No,” he says, completely baffled, “Why?”

“Um, well, you’re raising a little girl—“ Under her breath, Belle says something about stating the obvious, in her borrowed, sardonic tone. He doesn’t think Mary Margaret hears her. She is  _his_ girl, after all. “—and it’s only natural for girls to need someone, that is, I mean, a girl someone—“

“What’s this all about?” he asks, obtusely, beginning to lose his minimal patience.

“I started my period, okay,” she yells at the glove compartment, then, turning to Gold, she adds, “That’s what she’s trying to tell you. Can we go, now?”

“Ah, I see,” he says with a dry swallow, feeling extremely uncomfortable. Leaning over to address Snow White a final time, he says, “Thank you for the concern, Ms. Blanchard.”

She opens her mouth to call out a few last instructions, “I got her some things, but you’ll have to go to the store—“ she calls out, but Mr. Gold’s already rolling up the window and driving back toward their pink house.

* * *

All Gold knows is that he is completely out of his territory.

Belle’s suddenly old enough to be a mother in the old world (but too young, much, much too young, all the same), all awkward and gangly limbs, not quite sure if they’re belonging to woman or girl-child. He never asked why she waited so long to wed, in the Dark Castle. He should have, wonders now if he’ll ever get the chance (and it’s not lost on him that come spring, she’ll turn fourteen, and be old enough to go to war—that is unless they’ve lowered the age again).

It’s true that he has put this maturation off as long as possible (until literally, life has made the decision for him). Some time back, he’d briefly asked if she had been given that one particular talk—the one he very much did not want to have with her, over tea or otherwise. Colored tomato red, Belle had told him, that yeah, and no she definitely did _not_ have any other questions. However, this isn’t a matter of questions current, this is a matter  _practicality_ and questions future. Questions better asked of a woman more experienced and older than she.

Gold mulls over his options. He cannot go to Snow White, for he need not tempt Regina further than need be. The Lucas woman drives him stark raving mad on good days. Mother Superior and glittering entourage (though drabber in this world) are completely out of the question.

Sitting at his desk, flipping through his calendar of appointments, though he hardly needs the reminders, he thinks through who might be able commissioned, for a price, to help, when providence, surprisingly aides him. Looking at his three o’clock appointment for that afternoon, the perfect candidate presents herself.

It’s a meeting to discuss a loan payment about to come past due. The woman in question was having trouble keeping up with a mortgage on a new home with only her single income. She and her unfortunate husband had taken out the mortgage prior to his tragic accident—Midas’ daughter, in this world was not so fortunate as to have a continued line of income at her disposal from daddy dearest, while not-her-Prince Charming lay in anonymous comatose at Storybrooke’s one hospital. 

Problem solved. Woman’s a woman, and he’s sure Kathryn Nolan will suffice well enough as any. Better yet, with this woman, he has the upper hand.

He makes to leave for his appointment, peeking in at Belle who reads in the living room. He decides best not to disturb her—since the car ride, they’ve been awkward enough as it is, but after he passes the doorway, she calls, “Where’re you going?”

“Duty calls, dear,” he answers, peering back into the room.

Belle does not look up from her book, “Will you be back for dinner?”

“Of course.”

At that she looks up, nodding once, and then, hesitant, remembering exactly how she came under his care, she adds, “Drive safe.”

He gives her a brief attempt at a smile, unlike the snow it does not stick, and nods his agreement before leaving for the Nolan’s home.

* * *

He articulates the deal itself easily enough. He will offer the Nolan woman an extended date of payment, see to the refinancing of her mortgage, as well as a reduced interest rate on both loan and mortgage. For the last, he sweetens the pot, by offering to call in a favor with a contact of his across town: he will procure her a job, legal in nature, with the defense attorney, Albert Spencer—known as his highness, King George time gone by. All this in exchange for simply offering a bit of feminine guidance to his little ward.

With the extension, lowered interest rate, and better job, she would be able to pay much faster, and he would make hardly a pittance on the interest.

For him, the deal is more than worth it.

Kathryn—no fool, apparently—realizes this too, saying confused and shocked, “But… you do know you won’t make any money on this, right?”

Mr. Gold smiles, surprised at her riddling out the bottom line of their deal—few rarely did, or even took the time to try. “But I’d be getting the better end of the bargain, all the same.”

“It’s not like I can say no, can I?” she asks, wryly.

“One can always say no, m’dear. Who’s to say you even like children—perhaps you’re some sort of ogre, who eats little girls like mine for breakfast.”

At the word “mine” Kathryn’s brow furrows, but then, she’s smiling, and teasingly replies, “No, only for lunch.”

Gold chuckles at that, a little astounded to find her not only in possession of a sharp mind but also a sense of humor. “So then, do we have a deal, Mrs. Nolan?”

She smiles, “For me it’s practically a steal. Plus,” she says, shrugging, “I do like kids. I’m good with them.”

He briefly wonders if she’d say the same of herself in comparison to the princess Snow who teaches wee ones day in and day out. Following on the heels of that thought, Gold can only assume her true love, the physical education instructor, to surely be good with children, as well. “I imagine so,” he tells her, and after a pause and moment’s indecision, adds, “A shame, about your husband. I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Nolan shrugs. “That’s life, one minute you’re screaming about dropping tuna casserole and the next—“ her words drop off, and she looks down sadly to her lap. Without warning, she looks up, and her expression he can’t quite decipher. “You’re surprisingly charming, Mr. Gold, when you want to be,” she tells him, holding back a smile. “Okay, it’s a deal.”

“The deal is struck,” he answers, faintly, unsure how to take her unsolicited praise. Changing the subject back to the realm of logistics, where best he worked, he says, “Now, about the particulars, when should I be bringing the paperwork around for you to sign?”

* * *

“You’re paying her to be my friend, aren’t you?”

Gold frowns, as they drive to Granny’s diner the day next, where he will leave his little charge in the care of Mrs. Nolan for the duration of the afternoon. His much-too-smart-for-her-own-good charge.

The next day is a snow day, and Belle frankly resents losing the day she would have rather spent with her nose in a book in front of the fireplace. “On the contrary dearie, I’m not paying her, quite the opposite in fact.”

“I don’t need a babysitter,” she says, for he’s told her he’s business and prefers not to leave her alone for the entirety of the day.

“Ah, well, in that case, you’d rather accompany me in my dealings?” he asks, and Belle shakes her head, recalling the last time she’d gone with him. A trying day, that, for all parties involved (Belle, even in the Dark Castle, had never taken to childcare and proffered babes as easily as he’d wished).

They drive in silence, before she finally reveals her true misgivings over the arrangement: “What if she doesn’t—“ she begins, but stops, afraid of her own words, mid-sentence.

“If you’re going to start it, you may as well finish it, dearie.”

Frowning at him, she completes the worry, “She won’t like me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says, shaking his head at the crazed thought, “of course, she’ll like you. Where would you get a silly notion like that?

“It’s not silly, girls don’t like me.”

“That’s preposterous, Belle. Now, I know your best friend is a girl. She likes you well enough.” Couldn’t bloody well keep the two of them, Belle and Ruby, apart.

“Not like Ruby, I mean adult girls.” Sighing, she clarifies, rather resigned, “Women don’t like me.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he brushes off.

Raising a finger, she ticks off, stubborn and ready to fight her point, “Mother superior doesn’t like me.

“That’s a… unique case.” Gold chuckles, “And if I recall, dearie, you didn’t make her job very easy, nor much like her, either.” He smiles thinking back on the frightened wisp of a thing that raised a quiet sort of hell for the short duration of her stay at the convent, before he bartered her away to the pink house.

“Not just her. My teacher doesn’t like me.”

Gold frowns, wondering if their next parent-teacher conference would be best held in a dark basement or in his secluded cabin in the woods, “Also, unique. She simply doesn’t like that I called her methods into question PTA last.” He recalls the meeting with sick measure of glee, remembering the woman’s face as he rattled off mathematics equations, exhibiting her incompetence to the rest of the parents, primarily mothers, in attendance. He wonders now, if perhaps that hadn’t been the best way to go about it, for Belle’s sake.

She shrugs, “Still not all.” Raising her delicate (ink stained) fingers one by one, she adds, “Granny doesn’t like me. Mrs. Mavis doesn’t like me.”

“The Lucas woman doesn’t like anyone,” Gold counters, “and our dear neighbor, Mrs. Mavis doesn’t like  _me_ , dear, not you. Also, need I remind, you almost killed her cat that one time.”

He expected to draw a laugh from her with the final statement, but she makes no sound. Under her breath, she mumbles the final example, almost inaudible (almost reverent), “The mayor doesn’t like me.”

He thinks back on their last encounter, Belle holding the heavy, baby car seat, insisting upon it, because curse or no, some things never change, and Regina’s icy stare during the hand off.

He wants to tell her that the Evil Queen was always a lost cause (though, it’d be untrue, and they never,  _never_ lie to one another—one of their rules—that before she was royalty, her majesty was a little girl not so different from Belle, bartered like chattel and broken just the same).

Instead he settles on something a bit more cutting, “The mayor’s a jealous, old slag, and not worth your good opinion, m’dear. You needn’t worry over that one.”

They drive in silence, his little ward pouting, as she’s prone too often to do when he refuses to cave to her wishes (a thing that happens rarely,  _very_ , he might add), and it occurs to Mr. Gold, that Belle, all her life, has had limited interaction with women and might actually be intimidated by them, fear their evaluation and assessment, where as, she’s had practice, much, withstanding the judgment of men, she might very well tremble in fear at the thought of appraisal by an older woman. “Mrs. Nolan isn’t like that, Belle. She’ll like you. I promise.”

His final words draw Belle’s gaze, her eyes darting to his, and though her mouth still sits in a grim line, there’s hope in her look that wasn’t there before. He never promises something he doesn’t know to be true. Another rule.

When they arrive at the diner and approach the woman at a table near the back, Belle looks positively terrified, standing a touch behind Gold, though not enough to be noticeable. The look in the Nolan woman’s eye says she spots the affinitive gesture.

“Mrs. Nolan, I don’t think you know Miss Isabelle French, here,” he introduces.

Kathryn smiles, bright and perhaps it’s his imagination, but Belle steps forward, to stand beside him more fully, “It’s very nice to meet you, Isabelle.”

Turning to his ward, he tells her, “Belle, this is Mrs. Nolan.” Then he adds, because even if he is a conniving bastard, he’s a polite one, and he’s determined on instilling in Belle the same significance in exhibiting good manners, “You may call her Miss Kathryn.”

“Hi, Miss Kathryn,” she says, meek (but not terribly so).

He stays only long enough for the woman to sign the paperwork, before leaving his girl to her care. He follows them, of course, and after a tense half of an hour in Granny’s diner, the spark catches, and they’re speaking quickly, laughing, getting on thick as thieves and about as fast—though not nearly as quiet. By the end of the little, play date, Kathryn he counts it twice, puts a hand to Belle’s shoulder, loving, maternal, and without second thought. Belle does not flinch from it.

When he picks her up that evening from the Nolan house, before leaving, he calls local, handyman Michael Tillman over to shovel the woman’s driveway of the ice and snow; it’s the least he can do knowing both her knights in shining armor are otherwise engaged and will be for another decade, or so. Upon taking note, as she bids them good night, until next time (next weekend, in fact) she mutters something about chivalry not being dead, and cliché as the sentiment is, Gold can’t help but smile at it. 

 

 

 


	14. Part 2: Changes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Belle's becoming a teenager.

It starts small.

With the addition of Kathryn Nolan into their lives, femininity began to steadily creep into the pink house—slowly at first, with increasing speed and span (like an avalanche, he thinks). 

Gold begins to see hair accessories, little bows and ribbons, bobby pins and the like, scattered all about the house. He finds them in the oddest places: hidden away in the kitchen cabinets, tucked up against the stair case, behind the rungs, on the topmost shelves in the living room and the pawnshop—just one or two, never more. He assumes it to be a phase, retrieves them and returns them to the counter in her bathroom.

It’s not. 

When he finds them beneath the new coin rolls in the shop’s cash register, he brings up the matter. “Belle,” he calls.

She comes up from the back where she’d been dusting, “Yeah?”

He holds up the mysteriously regenerating items, “What’s this?”

“Hair clips,” she answers slowly, confused at such an obvious question.

He sighs, “Rhetorical, dear. What I mean to say is what’s it doing in my register?”

“Oh, it’s there in case of emergency,” she answers, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world

“Emergency? Dearie, I don’t think these’d do much in the event of fire or serious injury.”

She giggles (and there it is again—that avalanche of femininity), shaking her head, “No, I mean if I need it for my hair sometime.”

“So I gathered,” he frowns, “and is it too presumptuous of me to ask that you keep these on your person and not scattered to the four winds?”

That causes her to frown. “Oh,” she says, slowly, and she’s embarrassed (and he a little regretful), “I guess, um, yeah you’re right—how dumb. I’ll just,” she pauses, scratching the back of her head, shrugging, looking for all the world as if she wished the ground would swallow her whole, “I’ll stop. Keep them in my backpack or something.”

Belle walks over to take the offending pieces, but Gold pulls back, “No—uh—“

She stares up at him, hand out, unsure.

“They can stay. For emergency.” He slips the clips back behind the coin rolls, “I’ll get used to it.”

* * *

It does not stop with the hair accessories.

Brassieres begin to appear in the laundry bag he retrieves from the dry cleaners weekly. They’re all appropriately youthful, more function than aesthetic—though he hardly knows, he averts his eyes upon registering what he’s looking at as the dry cleaner waits for him to pay his bill.

These days, she walks around scented like candies and flowers. He can’t complain, but it’s certainly a surprise when she passes him his dinner plate and the smell of grape and lavender hits him. It’s syrupy and not at all natural.

“Something wrong with the meatloaf?” she asks.

It takes him a moment before he answers, “Not in the least.”

One morning he wakes startled, to the sound of machinery. He wonders if Regina’s decided to fuck with him and call for construction work on his street—a terror she sends all too often when she’s bored, though with less frequency now that she’s the baby to keep her distracted.

He wanders out into the hallway and over the whir he hears Belle singing from the closed off bathroom. One of those female contraptions for hair drying, he realizes. Blow dryer, the name finally comes to his mind.

It’s all rather trite, these changes. However, Gold draws the line at the lipstick.

They’re halfway home when he notices, slamming on the breaks. He imagines that his Cadillac wasn’t made for spur of the moment U-turns, but he doesn’t really give a damn at the moment. 

“What are you doing?” Belle screeches, and he realizes that she’s never seen him lose his temper before—nor his calm, rather (because this is  _hardly_ him without his temper).

He looks sidelong at her, and realizes with the way she eyes him, that he’s scared her. He takes a breath. “We are,” he says very slowly, hoping to calm her, (though she looks more confused than ever), “going to have a little chat with Nolan about the definition of  _age appropriate_.”

The moment he realizes he’s only called the woman by her surname is when he realizes that perhaps he might not have as much of a hold on his temper as he’d first imagined. 

They arrive, and when Kathryn opens the door, her expression is all warmth. “Forget something,” she begins, but the last syllable comes out a downward slope, as she takes in Gold’s expression, “or maybe not?”

“Not,” he assures her, barring his teeth, “however, you might have.” He raises his finger and the older woman looks to Belle, who eyes wide, is at a complete loss for words. Slowly, Gold points to the girl’s mouth, “What’s that?”

It takes a moment for her to realize he’s talking about the makeup. When it does, she begins to laugh, “You’re kidding, right?”

“No,” he sneers, “not one for humor.”

“It’s just a little makeup,” she rolls her eyes, “Nothing to freak out about.”

“Yeah:  _on a child_ —“

“Hey, I’m not a child,” Isabelle pipes up, and for a second, Gold looks surprised, but only for a beat before he quickly retorts, “Yes, you are.”

“ _No_ , I’m not a kid. I’m…“ she insists, but in the face of her caretaker’s intense stare, she sputters to no success, “I’m—“

“You’re what?” he asks, derisively.

She gapes, struggling, like a fish, as he still stares down at her (and Kathryn knows that pawnbroker’s stare—the whole town knows—and feels empathy for the girl). No words ever come.

“That’s what I thought,” he says. “Wait in the car.”

Her face contorts in shock and indignation, and the way she jumps at the cold of his tone both frightens and relieves Kathryn Nolan, frightens because the man is a terror, there’s no denying, but also relieves because that side to him appears to have never been seen before by Isabelle.

Blinking, startled, and on the verge of tears, she stalks to the car. She tries to hide it when she wipes at her eyes. Watching, Kathryn sighs, as the car door shuts, “Listen, Mr. Gold—“

“No, you listen: that display is completely inappropriate for one her age.”

She shakes her head, and under her breath scoffs, “Her age.” She leans against the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest, and she can’t help herself, she chuckles again.

“Something amusing you, dearie, because I see nothing remotely amusing about this situation?”

“You, that’s what’s funny,” she blurts out, and taking in Gold’s expression, she hurries to explain herself, “You’re trying to keep her a kid, but she’s almost in high school. She’s almost a teenager.” Kathryn watches as her words register with the pawnbroker, watches his face change. “She’s growing up—that’s why you contacted me, remember?”

His eyes dart from side to side, as if the thought had never before occurred to him. Kathryn realizes in that moment that perhaps this transition isn’t all that easy for the older man, that perhaps Belle’s not the only scared one of the pair. She softens her voice, “Look, I know it’s easier with kids.” She looks back to Belle in the car, puffy-faced and pouting, “Kids are great, sweet, mostly, and teenagers are scary, but Isabelle’s one of the good ones.”

“I know that.” His words are like stone, and yes, the woman thinks, he’s completely terrified.

“I know this isn’t easy,” she tells him a gently, but adds, stronger, “but you’ve got to let it happen, or she’ll rebel, and then you could lose her altogether. You don’t want that, right?” The dazed man stares, and she says it again, “You want her to grow up good, yeah?”

Gold takes a moment but then nods, slowly, “Yes.”

He looks around, but his face hardens, the wall slides back over his features again, “Yes, perhaps you have a point, Mrs. Nolan,” he hands center on his cane and he meets her eyes, business as usual—he’s Mr. Gold, town terror once again—“But first, a few rules. This transition, a slow one, I must insist. I’m not to be having any little tramps running around, one party away from getting in the family way.”

His hard language shocks the woman, but she chalks it up to a mask (and suddenly Mr. Gold’s not quite so terrifying), “And perhaps a little less tarty colors, next time, if you please, as well as a reminder that hemlines and collars are not to rise nor descend too greatly, and I’ll be appeased.”

Kathryn buries down the initial desire to state that the lipstick was hers and that she doesn’t wear tarty colors, but refrains, not pushing her luck. Though she’s one last thing to tell the man as he walks to the car, calling out, “Mr. Gold.”

He stops and turns, expectantly—his expression touched with that slight dismissal.

She smiles, “It’ll be okay. You two’ll get through this,” she says.

The dismissal falters for only a second. He gives a curt nod, before he gets in the car to leave.

* * *

“Dearie.” Belle says nothing, and he positively feels her trembling chest, holding back tears—she’s a brave little thing, his girl. “Belle,” he adds, gentler still, “I—“

“I’m fine,” she snaps at him.

He sighs and grimaces, “That’s all well and good, but not what I was going to say, however.” That finally draws her gaze. “I’m—I’m sorry I startled you,” he begins, and he forces himself to add, even though he hates admitting the word, despite feeling remorseful, “and I’m sorry for yelling at you.”

The admittance takes her by surprise.  “It’s okay,” she tells him, after a bit of a silence.

He nods. “You can wear the makeup, but I gave your Mrs. Nolan a few guideline.” He pauses, but continues, knowing the discussion need take place, “You were right: you aren’t a child anymore, but that’s difficult for an old man like me to realize. It will take some getting used to—so do bear with me, if you would be so kind.”

The formality of the request takes a moment her to decipher, but then she says, “Alright.”

He smiles a half smile and tugs out his pocket square. Handing it to her, Gold says, “But that color—you’re not a child, but may be a bit young for it still?” He’s made his tone questioning, but Belle knows it to not be a request, but rather with his raised eyebrows, a deep desire for unobjecting acquiescence.

She accepts the pocket square and wipes away the red without complaint.

* * *

It’s not always easy, having a friend like Ruby, Belle thinks.

Ruby made it all look so easy, being pretty, being popular. For Belle, it’s a little more complicated. She tries though, to learn from her friend, to look a little like the girls in her magazines, remember what Miss Kathy says about the best way to put on eye shadow. 

It wasn’t so much that Ruby tried to outdo her friend, so much as she simply moved too fast for the little reader to analyze and mimic her constant changes.

This however, this she can do.

The shirt, she already wears—a pale pink one, missing a button. That’s why it had been in the laundry room in the first place. Ruby had worn one that Thursday after school over a pair of jeans, with a brown belt, nothing so shiny as the usual belts girls were wearing, nothing with glitter or jewels. Ruby had called it “vintage.”

For the belt she knows just the one, seen him wear it many times. That’s how she finds herself looking through Mr. Gold’s drawers Saturday afternoon. She knows it brown leather, glossy (a little like Jefferson’s satin, but not so brightly colored) with a gold buckle, and since the shirt fits—only a little bit too big—the belt will work just as well.

The only problem is she can’t find it.

It’s not in his closet, nor hanging with his multitude of ties and suit jackets. She’d checked the shelves, and with his dress shoes. Leaving the closet, Belle puts her hands on her un-belted waist, “Where is it?”

She sighs and turns to the dresser along the far wall. She looks quickly through trousers and sweaters, the rest of his fully-mended oxfords. When she finds the drawer with a few polo shirts, she laughs a little at the idea of Mr. Gold in anything other than his usual, formal attire. The belt’s not to be found in his pajama drawer, with undershirts and lounge pants, and frustrated, she opens the last drawer.

Belle blushes. Socks and underwear, but no belt. She sighs, but doesn’t close the drawer. Acutely aware of her colored cheeks, she realizes that maybe she shouldn’t be in this drawer—that maybe she shouldn’t be in his things, in his room, at all…

“Belle?” She jumps, slamming the drawer shut with unnecessary force. “What  _are_  you doing?”

“I—“ she begins, staring at him. Gold stands in the doorway, hands frozen mid-removing his suit jacket. She’s taken him completely by surprise, home early from the shop. “I wanted to borrow a belt.”

“A belt?” he asks, still confused.

She nods, “Yeah.”

He raises an eyebrow, “To go with my shirt?”

She clears her throat (and when did her mouth get so dry? It hadn’t been that dry a couple minutes ago), “Ruby wore a shirt, like this, and a brown belt, so I, um, wanted to wear one too,” she finishes lamely.

“And we do everything Miss Lucas does, is that it?” he asks.

Belle shrugs.

He eyes her for a moment, eyes the discomfort positively flowing from her. Then, he chuckles, “Well, you won’t find one in there,” he says, pointing to the dresser. “However,” he begins, and walks past her, nary taking a look as they cross, to the closet. He begins to shut the door, but instead, reveals a row of hooks on the back of it, hiding his belts. He turns to her with a smirk.

She groans, feeling incredibly stupid for missing the obvious hiding place. “Didn’t see that, I guess.”

“Indeed,” He raises a hand, “so which is it to be?”

Belle points out the one she’d had in mind, “The brown one.”

“Ah, the cognac,” he removes it and hands it to her, “fine choice.” As she accepts it, he adds, “It’ll look particularly fine with the shirt you’ve already helped yourself to.”

She feels herself blushing again, “It’s missing—“

“A button, yes, I recall, though no place critical.”

She agrees, “I didn’t think you’d miss this one.”

“Sound reasoning.” After a moment, Gold raises his eyebrows, “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to let me see how it fits?”

“Oh, right,” Belle slips on the belt, and true, it’s a little large, but she thinks it will do the trick. She looks up at him, happy. “It works.”

“That it does.”

“I’ll bring it back, when I’m done.”

“No need,” he tells her, “keep it. You do it far better justice than I, anyway, dearie.”

“Oh,” Belle says, “okay. Thank you.”

He only drops his head to her once, with his succinct manners. They stare at one another for a moment, before she turns to leave, but his voice stops her, “Belle, just a moment.”

She turns back curious.

“Next time,” he raises a finger, “tell me, before hand, if you’ve need to be in my room—if you please.”

That heat returns to her cheeks again, “Oh yeah, sorry. I will.”

“Good,” he tells her.

She makes to leave again, but a final though occurs to her, “I can fix it, you know. The button, I mean, if you want.”

He’s taken back, but only a little, “Yes, actually, if it’s not too much trouble.”

She smiles, and leaves, wondering if she has time to run to Jefferson’s for sewing supplies before dinnertime.

 

 

 


	15. Part 2: Flickering Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kathryn Nolan sets Gold up on a date.

Widow Boyd is one of Mr. Gold’s least favorite people. 

For the first, Cinderella’s stepmother’s manners mark her as common, as well as ignorant. He finds the woman loud and obnoxious, completely self-absorbed, and lacking in any measure of wit or strategy.

No, he can not label her entirely unattractive. The opposite in fact, for a woman of her age (late forty-something. He’d never quite been able to weasel out her actual age, the steel-trap of a woman). However, beauty alone can not atone for his second reason for disliking Widow Boyd: she reminds him of his lost wife.

So, why on earth he agreed to Kathryn Nolan’s setting them up on a blind date, he cannot riddle out.

(False, he knows exactly why, reminded why every morning when he limps outside to pick up the morning paper and receives a falsely-knowing glare from his next door, bird-watching neighbor, another of his least favorite people. He very much wants to turn her into some tiny, edible insect. See how much she likes bird-watching then).

When the Nolan woman suggested the date, he’d agreed, but only after weeks of considerable urging. He regrets the decision instantly—he’d made the wrong choice, clearly, though not for misunderstand the deal.

Thankfully, Mr. Gold does not have to drive the woman. Unfortunately, nor does he get to eat the meal of his choice, that being steak (the Boyd woman can’t  _stand_ steakhouses. She’d said why, but he’d begun blocking out the sound of her voice at that point). Rather, they meet at Storybrooke’s one Italian eatery, which could only be lauded as passable on the best of days.

At least on the whole, the debacle had inconvenienced him only a very small amount, and in the end, when assessing his losses, Gold yields a mediocre meal and an unfortunate conversation partner, offset by the cost of the check and an evening that could have been much more agreeably spent. All in all, it could have been worse—but not by much.

Kathryn had generously picked Belle up after school, fed her dinner and promised to keep her until later that evening—or morning, she’d said with a wink.

Gold had not laughed at the quip.

When he arrives at the Nolan house to pick Belle up, he frowns down at his pocket watch, tapping his toe as he waits. Widow Boyd had insisted on desert, meaning the time is nigh on eleven, a bit late for his girl.

Kathryn opens the door gingerly, only looking a little surprised to see him, “Hey,” she whispers, “how did it go?”

“It  _went_ —nothing more to tell, really.”

Mrs. Nolan frowns, taking in his somber expression, “That bad, huh?” Gold doesn’t confirm this, doesn’t need to. The blond woman chances a look behind her shoulder, up the staircase behind them and says, “Well, I should have called you, but I didn’t think you’d be back this late. Isabelle’s out cold. I can drop her off tomorrow morning, if you’d like?”

Gold sighs. No, he would not like that, but something he’d dislike more—not like  _at all_ really—waking the child up when she’s already asleep comfortably.

Taking in his tense expression, Kathryn says, “You look like you could use a drink.”

Gold opens his mouth to decline, to tell the woman that he’d be back in the morning to collect his ward, but on second thought, he answers, “A drink would be lovely.”

Mrs. Nolan chuckles, stepping back to allow him entrance. After, locking the door, she leads him to the kitchen. Gold takes his time following, for upon their first meeting he’d not had much of a chance to look around the Nolan household. He takes in the photographs on the wall, and observing the Prince’s shorter hair, wonders what Midas’ daughter would have thought of the Shepherd’s twin brother, her original replacement-match. Probably found him arrogant, but that’s all hypothetical.

“What do you want? I’ve got vodka or peach schnapps.”

Gold immediately sets down the framed photograph he’d been holding, “On second thought, perhaps I’ll be returning home—”

She cuts him off, “Kidding. Whiskey on the rocks a bit more your style?

“A vast improvement.” Perhaps Midas’ daughter possessed more a mind than he’d first assumed.

“Thought so.” She pulls a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the alcohol cabinet that he can only assume the curse purchased on behalf of unconscious David Nolan, and pours it into two shallow glasses over ice. Gold limps over to the kitchen table, and sits, accepting the drink. He sips his whiskey, watching as Kathryn does the same—without nary a wince or cough.

Mrs. Nolan notices his surprise, and shrugging tells him, “Drank it in college.”

Perhaps Midas’ daughter possessed more mettle than he’d first assumed, as well (or perhaps the curse didn’t place the bottle there at all, rather the woman purchased it herself from the local liquor store).

She returns the bottle to the shelf, before taking a seat. “Now, it couldn’t really have been that bad.”

“Dearie, the woman talked about her satanic cat the majority of the evening.” He takes a generous gulp, while Mrs. Nolan laughs loudly. Gold adds quietly, “As much as I expected.”

Kathryn shoots him a confused look, “If you knew it was going to be awful, why’d you go?”

The dealmaker scoffs, “Now, Mrs. Nolan, best not to ask questions to which you well know the answers.” When the woman continues to frown at him, not taking his meaning, he finishes, “You hear the gossip, I’m sure. Our town’s not that large, after all.”

She gives him a sad and sober nod. After a few moments of silence, both of them sipping their whiskey, she observes, “You really care about her, don’t you?”

“I do.”

Kathryn’s forehead wrinkles, as she asks, “You didn’t—I mean, you weren’t in love with Mrs. French or something, right?”

He laughs, low and genuine. “Oh, no, no,” (He does not say,  _no, nothing like that_ , the phrase being much too close to a truth) pausing Gold adds, “I didn’t even know the woman, but she  _was_ beautiful.” When Mrs. Nolan frowns, he clarifies, “Stills. I’ve seen photographs, of Belle’s.”

The woman nods, but he can see her curiosity is far from sated. “Have you ever been, you know, in love?” she asks, at length.

He wonders now if the drink offer was more for reconnaissance, and the Nolan woman, like all the town, simply wishes to better understand the incomprehensible man who makes it a practice of keeping his reasons his own, makes secrecy a life style. 

However, as he appraises her expression, he finds curiosity, true, but behind that, genuine concern also. “Yes, once.”

“Your wife?” she offers.

Gold’s head snaps to her, glaring, “Who told you that?”

“Belle mentioned something—so you were married, once?”

He exhales heavily. He could hardly fault the wee thing. Children were never good secret keepers (as many had learned the hard way). He’d be needing to tell his charge that the story of his son must not leave the confines of their pink house. “Yes, once. A mistake rectified soon thereafter,” he tells her.

“And she was the one you loved?”

“No, it was not my wife.”

That gives Mrs. Nolan pause, “Who was she then?”

“Full of questions, aren’t we, dearie?” he states, hoping to end the discussion, but when the woman opposite does not look away or apologize, Gold explains, “She was, an employee of mine, a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

He takes a steadying sip of his whiskey. After, he idly turns the glass round in his hand. “Once her contract was terminated, I was told she died.”

“Told?” Kathryn prods—yes, Midas’ daughter was sharp for royalty.

“Information is power, and it was withheld from me—I was told too late, you see.” He chuckles at the woman’s shocked expression. “Don’t look so surprised, dearie. That’s the thing with making enemies, Mrs. Nolan, there are many who would go to great lengths to destroy the happiness of others—many in fact, when you’re as disliked as I am.”

“That’s horrible!”

He smiles his truest smile—his entire face colors to sadness with it. “Not completely. It was the one bright spot, in my rather tragic life. That’s the thing about love: all the rest rather pales in comparison.”

She chuckles lightly, “You sound like my dad.”

“Oh really,” he says, finishing his whiskey.

Kathryn takes away his glass and leaves to refill it. “Yeah, he’s always talking about how love and family are the most important things, to have your priorities straight.” She returns and hands Mr. Gold his now full glass. Smiling she says, “That’s how I met David, actually. My dad set us up.” She shakes her head as she tells him her tale, “He’d done some odd jobs for him, you see, and after, daddy keeps going on and on about how the two of us should go out. Just one date. Just give the guy a chance. For weeks, he went on like this.”

Rumpelstiltskin smirks at the meddling father, with all good intentions. He could picture the curse-manufactured memories of King Midas, “Sounds like him.”

“You know my father?” she asks, surprised.

“Rotary club,” Gold recovers quickly.

“Oh. Well, anyway, finally, I give in. It was just after I’d taken the LSAT for the first time and it didn’t go too well. So I was feeling pretty down about it, and you know how my dad is, once he gets an idea, he won’t let it go. I cave and David takes me on our first date, of all places, on a  _hike_ , and swear to god, I thought I’d kill him.” The two laugh at the idea of the well-groomed, young blond woman traipsing through the woods. “I’m not really an outdoorsy type of girl. I don’t do jogging or biking. It’s just not me. Well that’s totally David. Anyway, he takes me on this walk, and I’m lagging back, imagining how I can kill both him and my dad and make it look like an accident.”

_I could have helped with that_ , Gold thinks, chuckling.

“Then we come to this big opening, and I see this little well.”

“I know the one.” Of course, he does.

“Yeah, that one, well David tells me, and I guess he’d noticed that I wasn’t too interested in the date idea in the first place,” Kathryn shakes her head ruefully at the falsified memory, “he tells me, you should at least get something out of this date, even if it’s just a wish.” She shrugs, “After that, it was easy.”

Rumpelstiltskin smirks in pride over his well-designed curse. The memories are altered, of course, but mirror the old world. Midas’ daughter finds love by the waters of lake Nostos, as well as coming to an agreement with King George’s substitute son.

However, the memories are perhaps a bit too shining in nature (Regina’s alteration, he’s sure), for the Shepherd Prince had never been that articulate. He did well enough with a sword or in catching maiden fair (not in wooing, however—the precious couple had needed more than a fair amount of the trickster’s help to be together, after all), but lacked finesse with word play and cleverness.

Lost in thought, he hardly hears when Kathryn says, sad and quiet, “Some days, it hurts so much. I wish I could just forget.”

That catches his attention, “No you don’t.” She looks up, and he repeats, “You don’t.” The woman clearly aches not for her Charming, but for her Golden Knight, the man who spends his lonely days yelling at children to wear their proper trainers in the gymnasium, inflating footballs, and issuing detention slips. Though they cannot be together, and though Rumpelstiltskin chose a true love other than theirs around which to build his master plan, he decides to impart upon her a little wisdom, free of charge, “Forgetting lost love’s the same as forgetting what makes us human, Mrs. Nolan, what drives us. You see, the memories— _the ghosts_ —that’s all that’s left of ‘em. To forget that,” he says, shaking his head, “no, I can tell you right now, you don’t want that, dearie.” 

He downs the rest of his whiskey, before he tells her, “Besides, forget what’s important and you end up angry old man, like me.” He speaks in a candid manner surprisingly enough, one of the rare occasions in which he does so, but Rumpelstiltskin knows only too well the power of flickering ghosts to move the desperate soul and cannot stop himself from offering what little solace he can to the lost princess. “You’re young yet, Mrs. Nolan, I daresay, you may very well find your happy ending, before it’s over.”

* * *

Upstairs, Belle’s not asleep, not really. Hasn’t been for a while.

She had been drifting off when the knock at the front door had woken her, and because the spare bedroom had that cool hole in the floor—laundry chute, Miss Kathy had explained a few weeks ago, though Belle is still forbidden from trying to slide down it, as she’s been tempted to do since finding it—she hears the two adults in her life talking down below at the kitchen table.

Curiosity winning over fatigue, Belle climbs out of bed, tip-toes across the room, and silently lifts the chute open. She peers down into the glow, though she cannot see anything but the floor and a corner of the washing machine, and listens to the voices echoing up the sheet metal siding.

Like the story books Gold reads to her on days when she stays home, in the pink house, too sick for school, she listens to her two adults talk, completely transfixed. After they finish discussing Gold’s  _date_  (she’d told him not to go. Belle didn’t like Mrs. Boyd  _at all_. Belle knew that anyone with an evil cat  _had_ to be evil themselves. She didn’t understand why he didn’t see that), they talk about her favorite topic: love, but what she overhears startles her.

Gold loves someone. Gold loves a dead woman.

Belle continues to listen, wondering about his love. She wonders what kind of person she’d been, to inspire someone like Mr. Gold to love her forever, wonders if she’ll ever have a love like that, the kind that fills her hopes and dreams.

When she hears Kathryn walk her Mr. Gold to the door, the little girl crawls back into bed, and drifts off, hoping that, like Miss Kathy, Mr. Gold would believe that she too could find her happy ending some day.

 

 

 


End file.
